Banking trojan attacks turn up the heat in August 2018’s most wanted malware
September 2018 by Check Point
Check Point has published its latest Global Threat Index
for August 2018, revealing a significant increase in attacks using the Ramnit
banking trojan. Ramnit has doubled its global impact over the past few months,
driven by a large scale campaign that has been converting victim’s machines into
malicious proxy servers (detailed in Check Point’s Research
blog).
During August 2018, Ramnit jumped to 6th place in the Global Threat Index, and 5th
place in the UK. This saw it become the most prevalent banking Trojan in an upward
trend in the use of banking Trojans that has more than doubled since June 2018.
“This is the second summer
running
where we have seen criminals increasingly using banking trojans to target victims
and make a quick profit,” Maya Horowitz, Threat Intelligence Group Manager at
Check Point commented. “Trends like this should not be ignored as hackers are
acutely aware of which attack vectors are most likely to be successful at any given
time, suggesting internet users’ browsing habits during the summer months make
them more susceptible to banking trojans. This underlines that malicious hackers are
tenacious and sophisticated in their attempts to extort money.”
Horowitz added: “In order to prevent exploitation by banking trojans – and other
types of attacks – it is critical that enterprises employ a multi-layered
cybersecurity strategy that protects against both established malware families
cyber-attacks and brand new threats.”
During August 2018, the Coinhive cryptominer remained the most prevalent malware,
impacting 17% of organization worldwide. Dorkbot and Andromeda were ranked in second
and third place respectively, each with a global impact of 6%.
August’s 2018’s Top 3 ‘Most Wanted’:
*The arrows relate to the change in rank compared to the previous month.
– 1. ? Coinhive - Crypto Miner designed to perform online mining of Monero
cryptocurrency when a user visits a web page without the user’s knowledge or
approval the profits with the user. The implanted JavaScript uses a great deal of
the computational resources of end users’ machines to mine coins, and may crash
the system.
– 2. ?Dorkbot - IRC-based Worm designed to allow remote code execution by its
operator, as well as the download of additional malware to the infected system.
It is a Trojan, with the primary motivation being to steal sensitive information
and launch denial-of-service attacks.
– 3. ? Andromeda - Modular bot used mainly as a backdoor to deliver additional
malware on infected hosts, but can be modified to create different types of
botnets.
Lokibot, an Android banking Trojan and info-stealer, were the most popular malware
used to attack organizations’ mobile estates followed by the Lotoor and Triada.
August’s Top 3 ‘Most Wanted’ mobile malware:
– 1. Lokibot - Android banking Trojan and info-stealer, which can also turn into a
ransomware that locks the phone in case its admin privileges are removed.
– 2. Lotoor - Hack tool that exploits vulnerabilities on Android operating system in
order to gain root privileges on compromised mobile devices.
– 3. Triada - Modular Backdoor for Android which grants super user privileges to
downloaded malware, as helps it to get embedded into system processes. Triada has
also been seen spoofing URLs loaded in the browser.
Check Point researchers also analyzed the most exploited cyber vulnerabilities. In
first place was CVE-2017-7269, with a global impact of 47%. In the second place was
OpenSSL TLS DTLS Heartbeat Information Disclosure with a global impact of 41%,
followed by CVE-2017-5638 impacting 36% of organizations.
August’s Top 3 ‘Most Exploited’ vulnerabilities:
– 1. ? Microsoft IIS WebDAV ScStoragePathFromUrl Buffer Overflow
(CVE-2017-7269) - By sending a crafted request over a network to Microsoft Windows
Server 2003 R2 through Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0, a remote
attacker could execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service conditions on the
target server. That is mainly due to a buffer overflow vulnerability resulted by
improper validation of a long header in HTTP request.
– 2. ? OpenSSL TLS DTLS Heartbeat Information Disclosure (CVE-2014-0160;
CVE-2014-0346) - An information disclosure vulnerability exists in OpenSSL. The
vulnerability is due to an error when handling TLS/DTLS heartbeat packets. An
attacker can leverage this vulnerability to disclose memory contents of a connected
client or server.
– 3. ? D-Link DSL-2750B Remote Command Execution - A remote code execution
vulnerability has been reported in D-Link DSL-2750B routers. Successful exploitation
could lead to arbitrary code execution on the vulnerable device.
Check Point’s Global Threat Impact Index and its ThreatCloud Map is powered by
Check Point’s ThreatCloud 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.