Fortinet's August Report shows Return of Ransomware
Fortinet has announced its August 2010 Threat Landscape report, which showed ransomware variant TotalSecurity with its biggest comeback since March. Ransomware is a malware that locks out applications and data from a user's PC and then demands ransom for restored access.
"One indicator we observed this month was that the Ransomware application had gone server-side polymorphic, which means that the loader will connect to a single server and request a single file, but the code changes on an hourly basis in order to avoid detection,รข€ said Derek Manky, Project Manager, Cyber Security and Threat Research, Fortinet. "This is a technique typically seen with botnets, such as Waledac, and has been picked up by the developers of TotalSecurity. This is another example of how relying purely on antivirus is not a silver-bullet approach to protecting systems from infection."
In addition to ransomware, another highly detected infection this month is Zeus/ZBot, a do-it-yourself botnet kit that provides a malware creator all of the tools required to build and administer a botnet. The Zeus tools are primarily designed for stealing banking information, but they can easily be used for other types of data or identity theft. ZBot variants were noted to target U.S. military personnel this month.
One other notable attack this month is the recent Windows Help Center vulnerability. The attack experienced an exceptionally large spike in activity earlier in the month.
"One indicator we observed this month was that the Ransomware application had gone server-side polymorphic, which means that the loader will connect to a single server and request a single file, but the code changes on an hourly basis in order to avoid detection,รข€ said Derek Manky, Project Manager, Cyber Security and Threat Research, Fortinet. "This is a technique typically seen with botnets, such as Waledac, and has been picked up by the developers of TotalSecurity. This is another example of how relying purely on antivirus is not a silver-bullet approach to protecting systems from infection."
In addition to ransomware, another highly detected infection this month is Zeus/ZBot, a do-it-yourself botnet kit that provides a malware creator all of the tools required to build and administer a botnet. The Zeus tools are primarily designed for stealing banking information, but they can easily be used for other types of data or identity theft. ZBot variants were noted to target U.S. military personnel this month.
One other notable attack this month is the recent Windows Help Center vulnerability. The attack experienced an exceptionally large spike in activity earlier in the month.
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