To help IT teams decide where their points of focus should be to create an effective security strategy, we took a look at data in North America in the first quarter of 2018 to determine the trends in the threat landscape and paint a picture of the main types of threats that both individuals and organizations face today.
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Currently, cryptocurrency miners are heavily used by malware—we’ve seen miners injected onto ad platforms, on popular mobile devices, and servers. Malware creators change payloads to maximize their chances to make a profit, and in this volatile cryptocurrency landscape, they seem committed to integrating miners into their arsenal. We are now also seeing binary infectors using miners to suit their needs.
Read MoreThe Trend Micro Cyber Safety Solutions team has been tracking a potentially unwanted app (PUA) distribution campaign that installs PUA software downloaders. During our research, we found that some of these distributors started pushing malware along with PUAs in late 2017. In this post we focus on one of the older PUA software downloaders called ICLoader (also called FusionCore and detected by Trend Micro as PUA_ICLOADER). Different reports identified it as a PUA software downloader because it installed adware or unwanted software.
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We encountered a few interesting samples of a file-encoding ransomware variant implemented entirely in VBA macros called qkG (detected by Trend Micro as RANSOM_CRYPTOQKG.A). It’s a classic macro malware infecting Microsoft Word’s Normal template (normal.dot template) upon which all new, blank Word documents are based.
Further scrutiny into qkG also shows it to be more of an experimental project or a proof of concept (PoC) rather than a malware actively used in the wild. This, however, doesn’t make qkG less of a threat.
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Ransomware has been one of the most prevalent, prolific, and pervasive threats in the 2017 threat landscape, with financial losses among enterprises and end users now likely to have reached billions of dollars. Locky ransomware, in particular, has come a long way since first emerging in early 2016. Despite the number of times it apparently spent in hiatus, Locky remains a relevant and credible threat given its impact on end users and especially businesses. Our detections show that it’s making another comeback with new campaigns.
A closer look at the file-encrypting malware’s activities reveals a constant: the use of spam. While they remain a major entry point for ransomware, Locky appears to be concentrating its distribution through large-scale spam campaigns of late, regardless of the variants released by its operators/developers.
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