The number of active malware families and number of attacks increased by 5% in October, according to the Global Threat Index, a monthly ranking from Check Point Software Technologies.
The company’s threat intelligence research team found that locky ransomware attacks moved up in the rankings from third to second as its activity continues to spike, while the notorious Zeus banking trojan, which was initially discovered in July 2007, returned to the top three.
Locky’s rise is attributed to the constant changing and expansion of its distribution mechanism, which is primarily via spam emails.
Meanwhile, Conficker retained the top spot as the world’s most prevalent malware, responsible for 17% of recognised attacks.
HummingBad, which establishes a persistent rootkit on Android devices, retained its top spot in the mobile malware category.
Check Point head of threat prevention Nathan Shuchami said with the number of attacks and malware families increasing, the scale of the challenge organisations face in ensuring their networks remain secure is tremendous.
“The fact the top ten malware remained virtually the same as September suggests that cyber criminals have enjoyed a considerable amount of success with these attack methods, signaling to organizations that they need to proactively respond to protect their critical business assets.
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“It is particularly concerning that a malware family as established and well known as Conficker is so effective, suggesting that organizations aren’t using the latest, multi-layered defenses.”
Shuchami urged organisations to take a comprehensive approach and have advanced threat prevention measures on networks, endpoints and mobile devices to stop malware at the pre-infection stage, like Check Point’s SandBlast Zero-Day Protection and Mobile Threat Prevention solutions.
Check Point offers a complete security architecture defending enterprises from networks to mobile devices. It protects more than 100,000 organisations of all sizes.
