14 DAY TRIAL // Kaspersky Senior Virus Analyst Alexander Gostev wrote a report on malware evolution for the April-June period of this year. It has appeared on Viruslist.
It seems that hackers have stopped bothering with writing new types of malware. Sure, there have been some rather tough viruses in this period, but none was anything special, all new names, but the same old functions. I guess this has made life easy for heuristic based anti-viruses.
Gostev said in his report that the current period is characterized by the lack of any real new threats and an upswing in the commercialization of the virus writing environment. This is a great thing for anti-virus companies who finally have the upper hand now, after many years. In any case, hackers no longer strive to deteriorate computers or hack sites for the pleasure of seeing their names displayed on a high-profile page, but now, they're in it for the money. They no longer target PCs, but users. Why? Because that's where the money comes from.
In any case, hackers no longer create malware that does damage, they will build programs that will earn them dough and threats are evolving from social engineering to the increased usage of a variety of vulnerabilities to penetrate the system, as I've read in the same report.
Four important things mark this period: Cyberwar, The iPhone, Mpack and Viver.
The idea of cyberwar popped up after the web based attacks against Estonia. The aggression did a lot of damage, mostly taken by their economy that was based a lot on Internet features.
The iPhone is one heck of a popular gadget released by Apple. This product is bound to be a target for hackers, as a lot of people will own one.
MPack was one common hacker tool, used in the "Italian job" at first and then released upon more sites. And the "cute" part about it is that its creators can only be jailed for selling software without paying taxes, because they never hacked a site by themselves - their customers did!
Last but not least is Viver - this is a Trojan for cell-phones. This Trojan sends fee-based text messages to premium numbers. As a result, the subscriber who falls victim is charged a certain amount of money that is then transferred to the malicious user's account, as the report reads.
So this is what happened April to June, check out the link above for more on this.