Recent TrendLabs report: Hackers’ strategy revealed
The recent report by TrendLabs is a wake-up call for all small businesses that the bad guys are after them. In fact, hackers are now carefully crafting their strategy and are moving away from large-scale attacks to more personal attacks. Such tactics were used in the old hacking days.
Attackers are employing more sophisticated tools like automatic transfer systems (ATSs) and the Blackhole Exploit Kit to increase the strength of their attacks. As per the research, cyber criminals steal as much as US $1 billion a year from small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the United States and Europe alone. Against this, in the first half of 2012, Trend Micro protected SMBs against more than 142 million threats.
According to a senior threat researcher at Trend Micro, “Even though Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy seem to be targeted [by ATSs] most, banks and other financial institutions from basically anywhere are not safe from attacks.”
The report elaborated on the modus operandi and the damage-causing abilities of various virus infections, including Blackhole Exploit Kit Spam Runs, ATSs, iXesHe, Police Trojan Attacks, and Botpanda.
The research predicted that smartphones and tablets platforms will suffer more from cyber criminal attacks in the future. The existing scenario does not look good either. Presently, there are more than 400 million active Android-based devices and among them only 20% devices have security apps installed.
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