Intel Security report also points to more aggressive PUPs
Intel Security has released its new McAfee Labs Threat Report, which assesses the mobile threat landscape. In the final quarter of 2014, McAfee Labs' collection of mobile malware continued to grow steadily, surpassing six million samples, up 14% from Q3. The report also details the increasingly popular Angler exploit kit and warns of increasingly aggressive potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) that change system settings and gather personal information without users' knowledge.
In the fourth quarter of 2014, McAfee Labs saw the rise of the Angler exploit kit, one of the latest contributions from the “cybercrime as a service” economy to off-the-shelf tools that deliver increasingly malicious functions. Researchers first noticed the migration of cybercriminals to Angler in the second half of 2014, when its popularity surpassed Blacole among exploit kits. Angler uses various evasion techniques to go unnoticed by virtual machines, test environments and security software, and frequently changes its patterns and payloads to hide its presence from some protection products.
This criminal activity suite contains easy-to-use attack capabilities and new features such as fileless infection, virtual machine evasion and security products, and the ability to deliver a wide range of payloads, including banking trojans, rootkits, ransomware, CryptoLocker and backdoor Trojans.
The report also identified a number of other developments:
- Mobile malware. McAfee Labs reported that mobile malware samples grew by 14% in Q4 2014, with Asia and Africa recording the highest infection rates. At least 8% of all mobile systems monitored by McAfee Labs reported an infection in the last quarter of 2014, with much of the activity attributed to the AirPush ad network.
- Potentially unwanted programs. In the period, PUPs were detected on 91 million systems per day. McAfee Labs realizes that PUPs are becoming increasingly aggressive, posing as legitimate applications while performing unauthorized actions such as serving unintended advertisements, modifying browser settings, or collecting user and system data.
- Ransomware. Starting in Q3, the number of new ransomware samples started to grow again after a four-quarter decline. In the fourth quarter, the number of new samples increased by 155%.
- Signed malware. After a brief dip in the number of newly signed malicious binaries, the pace of growth has resumed, with a 17% increase in total signed binaries.
- Total malware. McAfee Labs currently detects 387 new malware samples per minute, or more than six per second.
McAfee Labs is the threat research division of Intel Security. For more information about the report, visit the link.
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