Symantec Corp. today announced the findings of its Internet Security Threat Report, Volume 16, which shows a massive threat volume of more than 286 million new threats last year, accompanied by several new megatrends in the threat landscape. The report highlights dramatic increases in both the frequency and sophistication of targeted attacks on enterprises; the continued growth of social networking sites as an attack distribution platform; and a change in attackers’ infection tactics. In addition, the report explores how attackers are exhibiting a notable shift in focus toward mobile devices.
“The growing prevalence and capabilities of the most visible cyber-events of 2010, Stuxnet and Hydraq, have turned the focus on protecting businesses and critical infrastructure, “said Shantanu Ghosh, vice president, India Product Operations, Symantec. “As India Inc. rapidly takes to mobile computing and social networking it needs to be watchful about the vulnerabilities and threats these platforms present.”
India Highlights
In 2010, attackers launched targeted attacks against a diverse collection of publicly traded, multinational corporations and government agencies, as well as a surprising number of smaller companies. In many cases, the attackers researched key victims within each corporation and then used tailored social engineering attacks to gain entry into the victims’ networks. Due to their targeted nature, many of these attacks succeeded even when victim organizations had basic security measures in place.
While the high-profile targeted attacks of 2010 attempted to steal intellectual property or cause physical damage, many targeted attacks preyed on individuals for their personal information. For example, the report found that data breaches caused by hacking resulted in an average of more than 260,000 identities exposed per breach in 2010, nearly quadruple that of any other cause.
Removable drives, but not removable malware: India was home to the third highest Stuxnet infections, after Iran and Indonesia. Stuxnet targeted sensitive information by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in order to infect machines through removable drives. The high infection statistics of Stuxnet in India can be attributed to the large number of computer users in the country relying on removable media for copying data. During the reporting period, Symantec observed that the majority of malware samples in India were spread through removable drives.
Indicative of the state of enterprise security in India, ISTR XVI finds the presence of older malware like DownadupB in the country. This points to the lack of basic security software and lax signature updates in Indian enterprises.
Critical infrastructure Protection: Stuxnet and Hydraq represented true incidents of cyberwarfare and have fundamentally changed the threat landscape. The nature of the threats has expanded from targeting individual bank accounts to targeting the information and physical infrastructure of nation states.
Social Networks and Instant Messaging – A Fertile Ground for Cybercriminals
Social Networks: India now ranks as the seventh largest market worldwide for social networking and the total Indian social networking audience grew 43 percent in the past year. The popularity of social networks is directly proportional to the volume of malware it attracts.
One of the primary attack techniques used on social networking sites involved the use of shortened URLs. Last year, attackers posted millions of these shortened links on social networking sites to trick victims into both phishing and malware attacks, dramatically increasing the rate of successful infection.
The report found that attackers overwhelmingly leveraged the news-feed capabilities provided by popular social networking sites to mass-distribute attacks. In a typical scenario, the attacker logs into a compromised social networking account and posts a shortened link to a malicious website in the victim’s status area.
The social networking site then automatically distributes the link to news feeds of the victim’s friends, spreading the link to potentially hundreds or thousands of victims in minutes. In 2010, 65 percent of malicious links in news feeds observed by Symantec used shortened URLs. Of these, 73 percent were clicked 11 times or more, with 33 percent receiving between 11 and 50 clicks.
Instant messages and instant malware: A growing number of Indian Internet users turning to instant messaging (IM) applications has opened the door for malware that spreads through IM applications and a large number of users are victims of attacks using this vector. W32.Imaut and its family are highly prevalent in the Indian region. This malware sends malicious links that are embedded in messages sent to users found in IM contact lists. Statistics indicate that social engineering tricks that entice users to visit maliciously crafted websites have been quite successful among Indian users.
Mobile Threat Landscape Comes Into View
The major mobile platforms are finally becoming ubiquitous enough to garner the attention of attackers, and as such, Symantec expects attacks on these platforms to increase. In 2010, most malware attacks against mobile devices took the form of Trojan Horse programs that pose as legitimate applications. While attackers generated some of this malware from scratch, in many cases, they infected users by inserting malicious logic into existing legitimate applications. The attacker then distributed these tainted applications via public app stores. For example, the authors of the recent Pjapps Trojan employed this approach.
While the new security architectures employed in today’s mobile devices are at least as effective as their desktop and server predecessors, attackers can often bypass these protections by attacking inherent vulnerabilities in the mobile platforms’ implementations. Unfortunately, such flaws are relatively commonplace – Symantec documented 163 vulnerabilities during 2010 that could be used by attackers to gain partial or complete control over devices running popular mobile platforms.
In the first few months of 2011 attackers have already leveraged these flaws to infect hundreds of thousands of unique devices. According to findings from Mocana, it is no surprise that 47% of organizations do not believe they can adequately manage the risks introduced by mobile devices. And, that more than 45% of organizations say security concerns are one of the biggest obstacles to rolling out more smart devices.
Threat Landscape Facts and Figures:
– 35 per cent of spam in APJ originated in India, and 32 per cent of APJ spam zombies attributed to India.
– 11 per cent of phishing hosts in APJ were located in India
– 286 million new threats – Polymorphism and new delivery mechanisms such as Web attack toolkits continued to drive up the number of distinct malware programs. In 2010, Symantec encountered more than 286 million unique malicious programs.
– 93 percent increase in Web-based attacks – Web attack toolkits drove the 93 percent increase in the volume of Web-based attacks in 2010. The use of shortened URLs also impacted this increase.
– 260,000 identities exposed per breach – This is the average number of identities exposed per breach in data breaches caused by hacking during 2010, nearly quadruple that of any other cause.
– 14 new zero-day vulnerabilities – Zero-day vulnerabilities played a key role in targeted attacks including Hydraq and Stuxnet. Stuxnet alone used four different zero-day vulnerabilities.
– 6,253 new vulnerabilities – Symantec documented more vulnerabilities in 2010 than in any previous reporting period.
– 42 percent more mobile vulnerabilities – In a sign that cybercriminals are starting to focus their efforts on the mobile space, the number of reported new mobile operating system vulnerabilities increased, from 115 in 2009 to 163 in 2010.
– One botnet with more than a million spambots – Rustock, the largest botnet observed in 2010, had more than one million bots under its control at one point during the year. Other botnets such as Grum and Cutwail followed with many hundreds of thousands of bots each.
– 74 percent of spam related to pharmaceuticals – Nearly three quarters of all spam in 2010 was related to pharmaceutical products-a great deal of which was related to pharmaceutical websites and related brands.
– $15 per 10,000 bots – Symantec observed an advertisement that listed the price for 10,000 bot-infected computers as $15 on an underground forum in 2010. Bots are typically used for spam or rogueware campaigns, but are increasingly also used for DDoS attacks.
– $0.07 to $100 per credit card – The price for credit card data on underground forums ranged widely in 2010. Factors dictating prices include the rarity of the card and discounts offered for bulk purchases.
