In The first quarter of 2012 saw a significant shift in the way the security industry approaches targeted attacks and advanced persistent threats, which are now viewed more as a long-term, on-going campaign versus the typical smash-and-grab incidents favored by cybercriminals in the past, according to the Trend Micro Q1 2012 Security Roundup Report.
Q1s visible events Linsanity, Whitney Houstons death, and sociopolitical upheavals around the world gave cybercriminals new social-engineering campaign material, equipping them to penetrate and or infect users and networks in order to access victims data. The report also noted that cybercriminals who launch APTs will often keep track of the different attacks within a campaign in order to determine which individual attack compromised a specific victims network. The Luckycat campaign, in particular, attacked a diverse set of targets using a variety of malware, some of which have been linked to other cyber-espionage campaigns.
New social networking site, Pinterest, gained not just popularity but also notoriety. Site users were drawn into re-pinning a Starbucks logo to get supposed gift cards but instead got malware. This quarters top spam-sending countries included: India (20 percent), Indonesia (13 percent), South Korea (12 percent), and Russia (10 percent).
Apple surpassed Oracle, Google and Microsoft in reported vulnerabilities, with a total of 91. Oracle came in second, with 78; Google, 73; Microsoft, 43. Apart from posting the highest number of reported vulnerabilities, Apple also issued a record-breaking number of patches last March. Trailing Apple were Oracle (78 vulnerabilities), Google (73), Microsoft (43), IBM (42), Cisco (36), Mozilla (30), MySQL (28), Adobe (27) and Apache (24).
In addition, Trend Micro reported that Apple issued a record number of patches to its Safari browser in March during the period. A year earlier, March was also a mammoth month for patches, with Apple addressing 93 vulnerabilities, a third of them characterized as "critical," in its Leopard and Snow Leopard operating system. Trend Micro also found in its quarterly security roundup that it found 5000 new malicious Android apps during the period.
"With the increased use of smartphones for Internet access and the huge Android user base, the increase in attacks targeting the platform is thus not surprising," the report said. In recent days, Apple security received a black eye with the outbreak of the Flashback Trojan, which at its height infected more than 600,000 computers. Despite some innovative efforts by Apple to eradicate Flashback, recent tallies estimate that 140,000 Macs remain infected with the malware. Meanwhile, Black Hats have started moving away from their initial vehicle for delivering Flashback--a vulnerability in Java for the Mac--and have begun boobytrapping Microsoft Word documents to spread the Trojan.
Amit Nath, Country Manager (India and SAARC), Trend Micro, said, The number of targeted attacks has dramatically increased. Unlike largely indiscriminate attacks that focus on stealing credit card and banking information associated with cybercrime, targeted attacks noticeably differ and are better characterized as cyber espionage. Highly targeted attacks are computer intrusions threat actors stage in order to aggressively pursue and compromise specific targets, often leveraging social engineering, in order to maintain persistent presence within the victims network so they can move laterally and extract sensitive information.
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