Cyber criminals use tools to hijack business transactions and steal information from SMEs
India has emerged as the top targeted nation by data-stealing malware. The cyber criminals used inventive tools to hijack business transactions and steal information from small and medium enterprises.
According to Trend Micro report, 16 per cent of the victims were from India while Egypt and Iran had 11 percent victims. The report notes that existing malware, toolkits and techniques were repurposed to target victims from these nations. “In the second quarter, we saw a shift in the threat landscape with cyber criminals becoming more sophisticated and creative, amplifying existing methods of attack, and using them in new ways. This quarter demonstrated that the potential damage caused by cyber attacks extends far beyond a simple software bug to hacks of airplanes, smart cars and television stations,” said Myla V. Pilao, Director, TrendLabs Marketing Communications, Trend Micro.
The report also notes that APAC region had over 118 million number of malware detections while the bumber of spam messages blocked were over 396 million. Users hit malicious URLs 214 million times and over 50 million hits were to malicious URLs hosted in the APAC region. The report adds that hackers are making strategic approach by targeting selective victims to improve their infection rates.
This quarter has seen even government entities becoming victims of cyberattacks with massive data breach on both the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in May and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in June. The OPM data breach exposed personal information of approximately 21 million individuals. The report also mentions significant increase in the use of traditional hacking tools like Angler exploit kit and CryptoWall ransomware.