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Hancitor Makes First Appearance in Top Five ‘Most Wanted’ Malware in Check Point’s February Global Threat Impact Index | |
Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2017 03:38:43 PM | |
The downloader, also known as Chanitor, climbed 22 places after more than tripling its global impact last month SAN CARLOS, CA — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. (NASDAQ: CHKP) has revealed that the Hancitor downloader has surged into the top five ‘most wanted’ malware families worldwide for the first time, according to the company’s February Global Threat Impact Index. The downloader, that installs malicious payloads such as banking trojans and ransomware on infected devices, climbed 22 places after more than tripling its global impact in the past month. Hancitor, also known as Chanitor, is usually delivered as a macro-enabled Office document in phishing emails with “important” messages such as voicemails, faxes or invoices. The index ranked Kelihos, a botnet used in bitcoin theft, as the most prevalent malware family overall, with 12% of organizations globally impacted by it. Having been active since 2010, the resilient Kelihos has evolved from a ‘pump and dump’ spam campaign into a botnet-for-hire, sending spam for anyone willing to pay. Despite being taken down in 2011 and again a year later, it has continued to resurface, culminating in the botnet and growing by more than three times in just two days last August. Today, Kelihos continues to grow as one of the most prominent distributors of spam in the world, with over 300,000 infected machines, each capable of sending more than 200,000 emails a day. Overall, the top 3 malware families revealed that hackers were using a wide range of attack vectors and tactics to target businesses. These threats impact all steps of the infection chain, including spam emails which are spread by botnets, and contain downloaders that eventually place ransomware or a Trojan on the victim’s machine. The top three most common malware in February were Kelihos in first, impacting 12% of organizations, followed by HackerDefender, impacting 5% and Cryptowall which affected 4.5% of businesses globally. February 2017’s Top 3 ‘Most Wanted’ Malware:
In mobile malware, Hiddad moved up from third in January to become the most active variant, followed by Hummingbad and last month’s leader Triada in second and third place, respectively. * The complete list of the top 10 malware families in February can be found on the Check Point Blog: http://blog.checkpoint.com/2017/03/13/check-point-february-top-malware/ Top 3 ‘Most Wanted’ mobile malware:
Nathan Shuchami, VP of Emerging Products at Check Point commented: “The rapid growth in the use of some malware variants grew during February, highlighting the challenges faced by IT departments worldwide. It is imperative organizations are sufficiently equipped to deal with the ever-increasing number of threats by adopting advanced security systems across their entire business network such as Check Point’s SandBlast™ Zero-Day Protection and Mobile Threat Prevention.” The ThreatCloud Map is powered by Check Point’s ThreatCloudTM intelligence, the largest collaborative network to fight cybercrime which delivers threat data and attack trends from a global network of threat sensors. The ThreatCloud database holds over 250 million addresses analyzed for bot discovery, more than 11 million malware signatures and over 5.5 million infected websites, and identifies millions of malware types daily. Check Point’s Threat Prevention Resources are available at: http://www.checkpoint.com/threat-prevention-resources/index.html |