Malware News Ransomware detections more than double on Kaspersky network

[omidomi]

ore evidence about the rapid spread of ransomware comes from the latest quarterly IT threat survey from Kaspersky Lab, which said this week that the number of Internet users that encountered ransomware more than doubled in the third quarter of this year compared to Q2.

It’s the third quarterly increase in a row, a testament to how much criminals like ransomware for pulling in money, as well as to how far behind security awareness training is among users.

The company said more than 821,860 were hit by the malware among those in the Kaspersky Security Network, which includes customers of its own and other antivirus service providers. The numbers come from customers that agreed to provide them.

“Crypto ransomware continues to be one of the most dangerous threats, both to private users and to businesses,” Fedor Sinitsyn, ransomware expert at Kaspersky Lab. said in a statement. “The recent jump in the number of attacked users may have been provoked by the fact that the number of modifications of ransomware we detected in Q3 – more than 32,000 modifications – was 3.5 times more than in Q2. This may be due to the fact that security companies nowadays invest a lot of resources into being able to detect new samples of ransomware as fast as possible. Criminals must therefore avoid detection by creating more new modifications of their malware.”.

 

[cruelsister]

And one reason for the spread of the locky.js family is that there has been a concurrent increase in Spambots that deliver this stuff. So although a given computer isn't infected itself by the ransomware it may be distributing it by the thousands (I'll be publishing a video on exactly this later this weekend).