Summary
This report analyzes the current trends related to financial phishing and banking malware, including attacks on mobile devices, POS (Point of Sales) systems and ATMs. The timeframe for this analysis contains data obtained during the period from July 1st, 2015 to October 1st, 2015.
Phishing
A group of 14 countries are on the receiving end of the 90 % of all phishing attacks. The remaining 10 % is distributed among more than 170 different countries. Only the first three countries in this ranking account for half of the worldwide detected attacks.
The number of phishing attacks against Mexico is remarkable, taking over from United Kingdom the second position in the ranking of phishing attacks in comparison to the last period. New Zealand has been the country that suffered more phishing attacks per user over the course of Q3 2015.
During Q2 2015 United Arab Emirates was in the first place of countries with higher percentages of users attacked by phishing. This level has slowed down during this Q returning to its historical series. Phishing messages targeting the financial sector (banks, payment systems and online shops) accounted for more than 30% during this period, an increase of a 2.8 % compared with the data analyzed in Q2 2015. Banks are still the main targets within this sector as we observed during the last years.
Banking malware
For the first time since the start of the year the number of Dyre infections decresed (-2%) globally. The impact in UK and Spain of this malware has grown significally during this period, confirming the interest of the Dyre gang for both countries.
The number of infections of the Zeus Trojan and its variants keeps decreasing for the second period during this year.
When it comes to POS malware the number of infections for Cardthief, a 64 bits POS malware, shows an increase of activity during the end of Q3 2015.
Mobile malware
Once again Android is the most frequently targeted platform. 99.69% of the mobile malware detected target this operating system.
Russian Federation, Vietnam and Ukraine have almost the 90% of infections. Germany, Italy, France, Poland and Austria are the most infected European countries.
ElevenPaths’ Analyst Team
