Report Shows Massive Increase in Malware Distribution

CYREN announced the release of its second annual CYREN Cyberthreat Yearbook.

Introduced by CTO Lior Kohavi, the comprehensive report serves as an analysis of last year’s most notable cybercrime trends as collected by the CYREN Security Lab, which monitors 17 billion transactions each day to protect more than 600 million users. Delivering a unique look at 2014’s top trends, the CYREN Cyberthreat Yearbook compiles eye-opening statistics as well as expected developments.

In addition to highlighting the impact of the heavily publicized cyberattacks at Home Depot and Sony, CYREN presents an in-depth analysis of individual threats captured in 2014 to illustrate how cybercriminals engage in the business of crime, how they target the business enterprise, and what CYREN is doing to halt the advance of cybercrime.

Top statistics from 2013 to 2014 include:

• 159% increase in malware URLs tracked by CYREN in 2014
• 50% increase in average daily number of emails containing malware – from 1.69 to 2.5 billion
• 42.34% of all spam was pharmacy related – the most frequent topic followed by job offers
• 30% decline in the average daily amount of spam from 78.2 billion to 54.6 billion

In the report, Kohavi states, “In December, CYREN observed its largest email attached malware outbreak for the year, with 10.7 billion emails sent on the 18th of the month, followed by another 10.7 billion malware-embedded emails on the 23rd. Malware URLs tracked by CYREN in the GlobalView Cloud increased by 159% to 1.06 million in 2014.”

Kohavi continues, “In the first and second quarters of 2014, CYREN began to observe macro-malware belonging to the Trojan families of Zbot and Dridex. Then in early November, CYREN observed an outbreak of over 3.02 billion emails containing advanced second generation macro-malware. Subsequent outbreaks in December consisted of as many as 1.2 billion emails in one day. Unlike earlier versions, this macro malware did not exhibit the same routines seen among early macro viruses… Macro malware is a good example of malware authors and distributors adapting to increased security measures and repurposing older tricks that users may have forgotten.”

The CYREN Cyberthreat Yearbook also assesses the threat associated with the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), noting that an ever-increasing number of organizations will become significantly more vulnerable if they fail to properly secure their latest technologies for smart energy efficient buildings, other industrial control systems (ICS), building access swipe systems, and video surveillance.

The entire report is available for download at http://tinyurl.com/CyberThreatsReport.