PandaLabs announced this week the data from the Third Quarter Report of 2013. Among the main conclusions was that the creation of malware in the world has once again reached record levels. With almost 10 million new copies detected, which matches all of 2012 completely. In this context, Trojans are still the major source of infection, in addition to heading the list of new malware generated.
Within malware, this quarter highlights the emergence of CryptoLocker, a ransomware that hijacks your computer’s documents and demands a ransom to recover them. Furthermore, there have been an increasing number of attacks using the technique known as DNS poisoning.
Moreover, although Android remains the most violated mobile platform this quarter, there has also been notorious attacks against iOS, Apple’s operating system.
CyberWar: the NSA in the Spotlight
In regard to cyber espionage, the U.S. has stolen the spotlight from China, due to the scandal caused after information went out about the program PRISM. With this program, the NSA (National Security Agency) could obtain information of users from big North American companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.
Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs, said, “Everything seems to indicate that we will continue to learn more details on different programs carried out by the NSA to spy on indiscriminately, and with all kinds of illegal techniques, to users, companies and governments around the world”.
The Quarter’s Figures
According to the study by PandaLabs, Trojans lead, once again, the ranking by type of malware generated, hogging up 76.85% of new identified samples .From there, it’s followed by worms (13.12%), viruses (9.23%) and adware / spyware (0.57%).
Moreover, Trojans also continue to be the main weapon used by cybercriminals to infect users. In fact, up to 78% of the samples detected in this period correspond to this category.
Infections in Other Countries
Among the countries with the highest infection rates, those located in Latin America continue to dominate. In any case, there are also countries in all major areas of the world, China being again the undisputed leader of this ratio with nearly 60 %, followed still by Turkey and Peru.
On the opposite side, Europe is the region of the world with lowest rates of infection. In this list the least infected with malware are: Netherlands (19.19%), United Kingdom (20.35%) and Germany (20.60%). The only non-European country that participates in this list is Australia, which comes in ninth place with 26.67%.
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