Coordinated attacks are expanding to different types of business and individual users, and there is a strong focus by malicious hackers and cybercriminals on data theft and attacks on mobile devices.

In Latin America, the countries with the highest rates of malicious activities are: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. Most of the attacks conducted from the Americas have a geographic IP address located in the United States.

Malicious Attacks Grow Rapidly and Exponentially

Symantec blocked more than 5.5 million attacks in 2011, which represents an increase of 81 percent over the previous year. The number of unique malware threats rose to 403 million, and the number of web sites taken down by attackers increased by 36 percent on a daily basis.

Spam was reduced considerably, and the overall system vulnerabilities discovered dropped by 20 percent. This indicates an interesting paradigm since attackers are not identifying and selecting their targets based on spam with the same frequency as before; they are rather turning to social media to pick their victims and launch their attacks. This means that the use of social engineering is on the rise, and social media is a conduit for virus attacks to literally take on viral proportions.

An interesting trend reported by Symantec is that religious and ideological sites were found to have triple the average number of threats per infected site than adult/pornographic sites. The following reason was offered by the company:

We hypothesize that this is because pornographic website owners already make money from the Internet and, as a result, have a vested interest in keeping their sites malware-free – it’s not good for repeat business.

Threats Against Mobile Devices

In its report, Symantec indicated that:

Over the past ten years we have seen a proliferation of mobile devices but there has not yet been a corresponding rise in mobile threats on the same level as we have seen in PC malware. If we look at how PC malware evolved, there are three factors needed before a major increase of mobile malware will occur: a widespread platform, readily accessible development tools, and sufficient attacker motivation (usually financial). The first has been fulfilled most recently with the advent of Android. Its growing market share parallels the rise in the number of mobile threats during 2011.

With regard to the above, tech writer Bill Anderson recently commented on the matter in the pages of The Costa Rica Star. In his article “Website Malware Targets only Android Devices, take steps to Protect Yourself“, Mr. Anderson concluded that:

“With over 600 million Android devices in the world, the purveyors of malware will always be seeking ways to infect your Android device.”

The affordability and flexibility of Android-powered devices make them very attractive to the mobile market in Costa Rica, and thus the demand for such devices -and the threats against them- can be expected to increase.

Symantec also pointed out that the loss of mobile devices is a major concern for individuals and for businesses that provide laptops, tablets and smartphones for their employees to use out on the field or to take home. In 2011, the Internet security giant reported 1.1 million identities compromised due to attacks or data leaks, many coming from lost mobile devices.

You can read the entire Symantec report at http://www.symantec.com/la/gin (in Spanish). The full report in English can be downloaded here (PDF,5.78 MB, 52 pages).

Source: Adriana Zamora Vargas, Burston-Marsteller