14 DAY TRIAL // Panda Security has published its threat report for the second quarter of 2013. The study has found that most of the new pieces of malware identified in this period were Trojans.
The figures show that over 77% of malware samples discovered in Q2 2013 were Trojans. Worms took the second place with just over 11%. Viruses accounted for 10.29% of new threats.
“Cyber-criminals use Trojans as a key tool to infect users, continually introducing changes to avoid detection and in many cases, automating the process of changing the Trojan,” said Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs.
“They use scripts and special tools in order to change the binaries run on victims’ computers to evade the signature-based detection used by antivirus firms.”
The global infection ration also increased slightly from 31.13% to 32.77%. The largest number of infected devices were in China (52%), followed by Turkey (43%) and Peru (42%). At the other end of the chart we have Sweden (21%), Norway and Germany.
As far as cyber espionage is concerned, the US has made a lot of headlines ever since news broke that the National Security Agency has been spying on both individuals and organizations. On the other hand, China is still in the spotlight.
“China continues to occupy many of the headlines regarding cyber-espionage, although in this quarter, the USA has been in the eye of the storm after revelations about the PRISM program that the NSA used to obtain data from users of platforms such as Facebook, YouTube or Skype,” said Corrons.
Social media attacks also took center stage over the past months, mainly because of the attacks launched by the notorious Syrian Electronic Army.
The complete Panda Security report for Q2 2013 is available on the company’s website.