Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Malware & Threats

Rogue AV Continues to Dominate Malware Charts

Rogue antivirus (AV) attacks are showing no signs of slowing anytime soon. According to recent statistics coming from GFI Software, April saw a continued increase in the volume of detected malware, with 73,000 new variants of threats being released daily — a 26 percent increase over the same period last year.

Rogue antivirus (AV) attacks are showing no signs of slowing anytime soon. According to recent statistics coming from GFI Software, April saw a continued increase in the volume of detected malware, with 73,000 new variants of threats being released daily — a 26 percent increase over the same period last year.

April proved to be an opportunistic month for cybercriminals with several high profile events setting up the opportunity for rogue antivirus (AV) attacks exploiting events, including the Royal Wedding, the Easter holiday, the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin becoming the first man in space, along with the release of President Obama’s long-form birth certificate.

Popular methods used to attack end-user endpoints and gain access to computers include SEO poisoning attacks which hijack legitimate search results, such as searches for Royal Wedding coverage, as well as rogue AV applications and malicious websites that prompt users to install fake software on their PCs to view supposedly exclusive content.

Consistent with the month of March, ThreatNet statistics revealed that seven of the top 10 malware threats in April were Trojans. Trojans detected as Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT (a generic detection that encompasses a broad array of Trojans) continue to be the number one threat, accounting for 20.73 percent of total malware detected this month.

Top 10 Malware Detections for April from GFI Software

Detection | Type  |  Percent

Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT Trojan 20.73%

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen Trojan 2.7%

Zugo LTD (v) Adware 2.54%

Trojan.JS.Redirector.cd (v) Trojan 2.27%

Trojan.Win32.Generic.pak!cobra Trojan 2.06%

Trojan.Win32.Generic!SB.0 Trojan 1.79%

Trojan.Win32.FakeAv.awrp (v) Trojan 1.28%

INF.Autorun (v) Trojan 1.27%

Worm.Win32.Downad.Gen (v) Worm 1.24%

Pinball Corporation (v) Adware 1.23%

GFI’s top 10 malware list is compiled from collected scan data of tens of thousands of GFI VIPRE Antivirus customers who are part of GFI’s ThreatNet™ automated threat tracking system.

GFI also warned users to be mindful of Internet searches for several high profile events during the month of May as well. These may include malware attacks surrounding the Indianapolis 500, Towel Day (celebrating the late author Douglas Adams) and college graduation season. Any of these events could be prime targets for SEO poisoning or phishing attacks, and users should also be wary of unsolicited emails or web offers.

Written By

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

SecurityWeek’s Threat Detection and Incident Response Summit brings together security practitioners from around the world to share war stories on breaches, APT attacks and threat intelligence.

Register

Securityweek’s CISO Forum will address issues and challenges that are top of mind for today’s security leaders and what the future looks like as chief defenders of the enterprise.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Cybercrime

No one combatting cybercrime knows everything, but everyone in the battle has some intelligence to contribute to the larger knowledge base.

Malware & Threats

Threat actors are increasingly abusing Microsoft OneNote documents to deliver malware in both targeted and spray-and-pray campaigns.

Malware & Threats

Unpatched and unprotected VMware ESXi servers worldwide have been targeted in a ransomware attack exploiting a vulnerability patched in 2021.

Malware & Threats

A vulnerability affecting IBM’s Aspera Faspex file transfer solution, tracked as CVE-2022-47986, has been exploited in attacks.

Cybercrime

The recent ransomware attack targeting Rackspace was conducted by a cybercrime group named Play using a new exploitation method, the cloud company revealed this...

Application Security

Virtualization technology giant VMware on Tuesday shipped urgent updates to fix a trio of security problems in multiple software products, including a virtual machine...