More Than Half of the Chinese Malware Is Harvesting Passwords

Chinese malware is designed to harvest usernames and passwords in a proportion of over 50%. The statistics were provided by Sophos and are illustrative of the Chinese originated malware for October. Sophos additionally revealed that financial gain and identity theft drive the tendencies of Chinese malicious code. No less than 45.2% of malware is designed to harvest online game login information.

"Given the ever growing popularity of online gaming in China, this is a worrying trend - once hackers have stolen login details, they can effectively impersonate the victim in the online world," explained Carole Theriault, senior security consultant for Sophos." Millions of people play these games every day, but once inside the game, it's difficult to check their identity and these cyber criminals can wreak havoc, for example buying and selling items in online stores and running up huge debts without the victim even realising."

In addition, 7.5% of malicious code was build to steal username and password information related to the Chinese QQ instant messaging client.

"While hacking into an instant messaging client may not seem like the end of the world, the danger is that the cyber criminals will have inadvertently gained access to bank accounts, or cracked the passwords to secure password protected information, from which they can steal confidential and financial information," concluded Theriault.