According to the FortiGuard threat landscape research for 2013, Symbian is a distant second target at 3.45% and iOS, BlackBerry, PalmOS and Windows together don’t even warrant 1%.
“The rapid growth of malware targeting Android continues to be of concern to system administrators who have implemented a BYOD strategy on their networks,” said Axelle Apvrille, senior mobile antivirus researcher with FortiGuard Labs, in a statement. “FortiGuard Labs detected over 1,800 new distinct families of viruses in the past year, and the majority of those are targeting Google’s Android platform. Looking at the growth of Android malware, we can see above that there is much to be concerned about going into 2014.
The NewyearL.B Android malware, which was bundled inside seemingly harmless downloads like a flashlight application, continued to target millions of devices and was the number one mobile malware family seen all year. Unwitting or unaware users looking to try out the latest games or apps find themselves unknowingly sharing a wealth of personal information with an attacker, leading to obtrusive advertisements and other negative effects, such as allowing NewyearL.B permission to add and remove system icons and modify and delete the contents of any external storage. And the distribution of Android malware continues to accelerate.
“Clearly cybercriminals are putting a substantial amount of effort into churning out hundreds of thousands of new variants daily in the hopes that some of them will be successfully implanted on a target device,” said Apvrille.
The mobile malware growth shows no signs of slowing; in fact, it’s accelerating. And as more Android-based devices are purchased and taken online, the opportunities for attackers to infect increases as well. Adding to the issue is the fact that there are hundreds of low-cost Android devices available for purchase, many within the reach of the developing world. So whole new set of users with very little, if any, exposure to the internet is coming online.
“As these new users embrace their new phone or tablet, we expect a surge in new infections and incidents,” Apvrille said.
Meanwhile, FortiGuard Labs also noted that the ZeroAccess botnet continued to systematically add about 100,000 new infections weekly, leading researchers to believe that the person or persons behind it were not only paying a substantial amount of money weekly to generate new affiliate infections, but that they were able to make a significant amount of money doing so.
“Like other cybercriminals, ZeroAccess’s owners have taken pages from the playbooks of legitimate businesses and made successful attempts to diversify their income generation,” said Richard Henderson, security strategist with Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs. “We saw 32- and 64-bit versions of ZeroAccess being used to commit click fraud, search engine poisoning and to mine Bitcoin. With the dramatic rise in Bitcoin value over 2013, it’s likely that the owners of ZeroAccess have profited substantially on the backs of their victims.”
But in terms of general PC malware, the ZeuS trojan took the top spot in 2013, with more than 20 million attempts to infect FortiGate-protected networks. ZeuS first showed up on computers in 2007 and has been a thorn in the side of internet users ever since. The 2011 leak of ZeuS’ source code led to an explosion of copy-cat variants by aspiring cybercriminals looking to make their fortunes on the backs of innocent victims.
While ZeuS was often used as a financial trojan, a significant number of ZeuS infections were used to deliver and execute the CryptoLocker ransomware.
“An interesting and nefarious development late in 2013 saw ZeuS infections being used in a new way,” Henderson continued. “CryptoLocker put a new spin on ransomware in that it used uniquely generated cryptographic key pairs to fully encrypt the contents of a victim’s computer, and any mapped drive the victim had the ability to write to. Cryptolocker would then inform the victim they had a short period of time to pay a significant ransom - sometimes as much as a few hundred dollars, and typically only paid using the Bitcoin cryptocurrency - before the encryption key used to encrypt the victim’s computer was deleted, making the victim’s files completely unrecoverable.”
Victims ranged from home users losing thousands of personally significant files such as photographs and home movies, to businesses of all sizes and public agencies. CryptoLocker was also seen to infect users via other methods, including infected flash drives, often in combination with fake program activation tools commonly spread through file sharing sites and through infected email attachments.