About 291,800 new mobile malware programs emerged in Q2 2015, which which is 2.8 times greater than in Q1, says a report released by Kaspersky Lab.
Moreover, there were 1 million mobile malware installation packages in Q2, which is 7 times greater than in Q1.
According to Kaspersky’s Q2 cyberthreats report, mobile banking remained the main target for cyber threats. “Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.OpFake.cc was capable of attacking no less than 29 banking and financial applications,” the report said.
The Trojan’s latest version that emerged in Q2 is capable of attacking 114 (four times more) banking and financial applications. “Its main goal is to steal the user’s login credentials with which to attack, among others, several popular email applications,” the report said.
Financial threats are not limited to banking malware programs which attack the clients of online banking systems.
“Apart from banking malware (83%), financial threats are posed by Bitcoin miners (9%) – these are malware programs that use the victim’s computer’s computational resources to generate bitcoins, as well as bitcoin wallet stealers (6%) and keyloggers (2%),
according to the report.
Cyberespionage attacks target SMB companies
The second quarter has also witnessed the cybercriminals’ interest in small and medium businesses.
“This type of businesses was targeted by the cyberespionage campaign Grabit. Cybercriminals focused on economic sectors such as chemical industry, nanotechnologies, education, agriculture, mass media and construction,” the report said.
Alexander Gostev, Chief Security Expert at Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research and Analysis Team said, “In Q2 we launched an important initiative called Securing Smart Cities. If security measures are not planned at the development stage that could have serious implications later, and retro-fitting security might not be a straightforward task.”
Q2 in figures
- According to KSN data, Kaspersky Lab solutions detected and repelled a total of 379.9 millions of malicious attacks from online resources located all over the world – this is 19% lower than in Q1.
- During the three month period, an average of 23.9% of Internet users’ computers across the world came under a web-borne attack at least once. This is 2.4 percentage points lower than in Q1.
- 26,000,000 unique malicious objects were detected, which is 8.4% lower than in Q1. The script AdWare.JS.Agent.bg was the most widespread among such objects – this script is injected by adware programs into arbitrary web pages.