According to a report conducted by Kaspersky Lab, 32.58% of users in the UAE were targeted in 2015. The UAE was also positioned as a ‘high risk’ country with 52.7% infections, in the category reflecting the level of local threats.
The report also highlights a new trend: for the first time ever, mobile financial threats rank among the top ten malicious programs designed to steal money. Two families of mobile banking Trojans – Faketoken and Marcher – were included in 2015’s top 10 banking Trojans. Another trend for the year is the rapid spread of ransomware. Kaspersky Lab detected this in 200 countries and territories in 2015.
Findings reveal cybercriminals looking to minimize the risk of criminal prosecution switched from malware attacks to the aggressive distribution of adware. In 2015, adware accounted for 12 of the top 20 web-based threats. Advertising programs were registered on 26.1% of user computers.
In 2015, ransomware rapidly expanded its presence on new platforms. One in six (17%) ransomware attacks now involves an Android device, barely a year after the platform was first targeted. Kaspersky Lab’s experts identified two big ransomware trends during 2015. The first is that the total number of users attacked by encryption ransomware increased to almost 180K, up 48.3% compared to 2014., Secondly, in many cases, the encryptors are becoming multi-module and, in addition to encryption, include functionality designed to steal data from victim computers.
Kaspersky Lab’s statistics show that cybercriminals prefer to operate and use hosting services in different countries where the hosting market is well-developed: 80% of attack notifications blocked by antivirus components were received from online resources located in 10 countries. The top three countries where online resources were seeded with malware remained unchanged from the previous year: the USA (24.2%), Germany (13%), and the Netherlands (10.7%).
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