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Most-Reported Online Threats in April
04/05/08
Fortinet says
that the top 10 most reported high-risk threats for April 2008 were
driven by a campaign launched on April Fools Day and two online
gaming trojans that primarily targeted a number of Asian countries:
China/Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.
With their
eyes on Asia, Trojans OnLineGamesEncPK.fam!tr.pws and
OnLineGames.SIN jumped 15 and 31 spots, respectively, to land in the
sixth and seventh positions on Fortinet's Top 10 list for April.
Additionally, the Cutwail variant Mutant.CV made an impressive debut
at the No. 2 position and was first observed on April Fools Day as a
screen-saver attachment in mass mail.
Fortinet's
FortiGuard Global Security Research Team compiled this report based
on intelligence gathered from FortiGate multi-threat security
systems in production worldwide.
Additional
malware trends observed during this period include the following:
*
OnLineGamesEncPK.fam!tr.pws targeted 80 percent of its attack on
Taiwan. The remaining 20 percent were spread among Japan (7.1), the
U.S. (1.9), India (1.7), Mexico (1.1) and others.
*
OnLineGames.SIN also focused 80 percent of its efforts on one Asian
country, choosing China to receive the brunt of its attack. Japan
(7.6), Hong Kong (4.6), Taiwan (2.3), Korea (1.0) and others made up
the remainder.
* In
addition to the heavy attack on one country, emails seeded with the
two online gaming Trojans also leveraged the traditional Chinese
language as a localisation tactic.
*
Mutant.CV began its campaign on April Fools Day with concentrated
spikes of activity, while the gaming Trojans showed consistent daily
volume throughout the month.
"With Asia
accounting for more than 50 percent of all online gaming revenue
worldwide according to recent reports, it's no surprise that the
cyber criminal activity we witnessed this past month were localised
attacks to this region," said Derek Manky, security researcher for
Fortinet. "Due to the prosperous nature of the thriving online
gaming community, it's highly likely we will continue to see these
types of attacks in the future."
Nick Gibson, editor
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