Cybercriminals are increasingly trying to gain access to the online accounts of users. Last year, the number of cyber-attacks involving financial malware increased to 28,4-million – 27,6% more than in 2012. This is according to Kaspersky Lab’s Financial Cyber Threat in 2013 study.
Programs designed to steal financial information include banking Trojans, keyloggers and two relatively new classes of malware – one that steals from Bitcoin wallets and another that downloads software to generate the crypto-currency.
The combined activity of programmes targeting Bitcoin became one of the main drivers behind the growth in financial cyber-attacks in 2013. Another factor was the discovery of a number of dangerous vulnerabilities used by criminals to conduct cyber-attacks via the popular Java platform.
In 2013, Kaspersky Lab security solutions protected 3,8-million users from financial attacks (an increase of 18.6% year on year). Banking Trojans, including the notorious Zbot, Carberp, and SpyEye programmes, accounted for two-thirds of financial malware. However, compared with 2012 the share of this type of malware has fallen due to an increase in activity by malicious programs targeting Bitcoin.
In 2013, in South Africa, Kaspersky Lab’s solutions detected over 83 000 attempts to infect user’s PCs with financial malware – this is an over 105% increase in comparison to 2012. An average number of attacks of financial malware per user was 3,6; the number of users attacked raised by 139% in comparison with 2012 – more than 4% of users faced them.
The proportion of keyloggers – malicious programmes that intercept keystrokes – also saw a gradual decline as cybercriminals switch from these highly specialised programmes to Trojans with a wide range of functions.
The proportion of financial cybercrime is greatest in Afghanistan, Bolivia, Cameroon, Mongolia, Myanmar, Peru, Turkey and Ethiopia, where this type of threat accounted for more than 12% of all malware incidents.
