Aggressive Malware

Along with the development of technology, stretching malware (malicious programs) do not show signs of disappearing from the cyber world. Conversely, even tend to become aggressive.

According to Symantec's Intelligence Report, in cyberspace significant increase of activity associated with something described as an aggressive generic polymorphic malware and change shape rapidly.

Where one of identified hazardous 280.9 emails in July 2011. This increase was more than double the number at six months ago.

According to Symantec - as the makers of this safety report - this phenomenon indicates that the presence of a more aggressive strategy by cyber criminals.

"The number of variants or different types of malware involved in each attack has increased dramatically, by 25-fold, when compared with the previous six months," said Paul Wood, Senior Intelligence Analyst, Symantec Cloud.

"This is a deployment which is very annoying in a very short time, thus increasing the risk profile of many organizations / companies for this new type of malware is much more difficult to detect using traditional security defenses," said Paul, in his statement on Tuesday (16/08/2011 ).

The report also shows that the malware is often stored in an executable file that is in the attached zip archive file and is often disguised as a PDF file or Office document.

"An aggressive approach in the deployment of a generic polymorphic malware in the scale is appropriate to make a lot of companies concerned, especially those that rely on more traditional security devices because this type of malware is designed to catch passes from traditional security devices," said Paul.

One example of this technique, he added, involves changing the startup code in almost all versions of malware, subtly changing the structure of the code and make the emulator in many antivirus products more difficult to identify the code as malicious code.

Further analysis also revealed that phishing attacks have been looking for different media to exploit the most vulnerable mobile users.

"Two key areas where I could see this trend is an increase in phishing to the page about wireless application protocol (WAP) which is a web page that is designed for small mobile devices such as mobile phones. As well as the use of domain names that have been controlled and was registered for mobile devices, like, using the highest level domain name. mobi, "Paul explains.

Symantec itself has identified phishing websites that resemble the pages of the original web and have been monitoring this trend.

In July, social networking and brand information services are often found in these phishing websites. The main motive of these attacks is identity theft. Targeting mobile users is only part of a new strategy to achieve the same result.