14 DAY TRIAL // AVG released its Q3 report in which they highlight the new monetization ways deployed by criminal masterminds that look for a quick profit using minimal resources, a thing that can be achieved easily thanks to the latest technological advancements.
Apart from the Zynga coins or Facebook credits, which are the new craze among hackers, it looks as Facebook clipjacking and Blackhole attacks are also taking off, in March 2011, 8 million incidents being detected.
The numbers from the study show that rogue AVs are the main threat recorded in the third quarter of 2011, closely followed by Blackhole exploit kits (17%) and, our favorite, social engineering (13%). Pharmacy spam sites, even though relatively old, still haven't died out yet, occupying the forth position in the chart.
AutoRun (11%) and Downadup (5%) don't seem to affect only Romania, the global graph showing they take on first and third positions, our friends Sality and Fake Alert proudly completing the poll.
Out of all the malware in the world, Trojans seem to be the most prevalent, taking up almost half the chart, Spyware, Downloaders, and Adwares being far behind.
Surprisingly, Blackhole is not the leader of the exploit kits anymore as Fragus is the new ruler, being spotted in 42% of the hits. Com.noshufu.android.su clearly wins the battle of Android malicious applications, identified by AVG threat labs with 45%, followed by com.z4mod.z4root with only 7%.
When it comes to spam sources, the US is still well in the lead and speaking of America, Hotmail is the number one domain utilized in spam messages while English remains the preferred language.
Blackhole attacks have a whole chapter to themselves in the report, underground research revealing that a kit lent from Russia can cost about $1500 (1000 EUR) per year. It's powered by PHP and MySQL and it can easily target Windows systems by exploiting vulnerabilities in Java, Adobe products and Internet Explorer.