Ransomware is the fastest growing malware category as total malware rises in the order of millions per month, with the ransomware industry now worth billions of dollars per year.
The quarterly security report by Panda Security’s PandaLabs found that Trojans were topping the captured malware list.
This was against a background average of 200,000 new threats detected each day, with a total of 18 million new malware samples being detected in the three month period.
This was slightly down on the previous quarter, where 227,000 new malware types had been detected per day.
The Cisco 2016 Midyear Cybersecurity Report, released on 26 July, stated that ransomware was now the most profitable malware type in history. The PandaLabs report also estimated that the ransomware industry was now worth in the order of billions of dollars per year.
As well as finding a fivefold increase in HTTPS traffic related to malicious activity in the first half of the year, the Cisco report identified several trends in web attack methods which could be driving ransomware growth.
Windows Binaries were the most commonly observed malware, with 25,744 detected in the first half of the year. The report said these kinds of attacks allow attackers to gain a foothold in network infrastructure so they can launch attacks like ransomware.
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Facebook scams followed with 20,783 incidences detected, with JavaScript Redirection and Downloader Trojans following with 17,249 and 10,984 observed respectively.
Earlier this week, an alliance of Europol, the Dutch National Police, Intel Security and Kaspersky Lab launched the online portal, No More Ransom.
This aims to inform members of the public about ransomware and help them recover data without having to pay ransoms. The portal provides information on what ransomware is and how to protect against it, as well as providing tools that the creators of the site say might be able to decrypt against some types of malware encryption. There are over 160,000 keys on the site.
