Ransomware outbreak: A tide of online fraud schemes

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An online fraud campaign, which led to the theft of $500,000 from 190 victims in just one week, was detected by an organizations that tracks the rising tide of online attacks.

Kaspersky Lab has also located a cellphone cryptolocker that has already affected more than 2,000 devices in 13 countries, all in less than a month. The cryptolocker, called Pletor, locks devices claiming that pornography regulations have been violated, encrypts the contents of the device’s memory card, and then displays a ransom demand.

Online extortion technologies are growing more and more advanced. One of the versions detected was aimed specifically at American users. It includes a trojan that locks the infected device and demands a $200 ransom for its release.

During the first quarter of 2014 there has also been a rise in the number of malicious objects. Kaspersky lab identified 50 million malicious scripts, internet pages, executable files and other objects, twice the number of objects detected during Q1 2013.

iHLS – Israel Homeland Security

There has also been a rise in the number of banking threats: Almost a million malicious code attacks targeting banking establishments were recorded in Brazil, Russia, Italy, Germany and the United States. Most types of these malicious codes inject HTML code into internet pages displayed on browsers, and intercept payment data fed by users into original or fake online forms.

There’s been a shift in the leading sources of online attacks: Germany has risen from the fourth place to occupy the first, and the U.S. went down from first to second. 44% of attacks used internet resources located in those two countries. They’re following by Holland, Russia and Canada.

In Q1 2014 the size of Kaspersky Lab’s malicious code database reached 365,000 malicious codes aimed at cellphones, an additional 65,000 compared to Q1 2013.