Welcome to the September 2015 Newsletter.
It was extremely worrying to see PandaLabs – Panda Security’s malware research laboratory –confirm a record increase in the creation of new malware samples in its latest report*, covering Q2 2015. In the second quarter of 2015 alone, there was an average of 230,000 new malware samples detected each day: a total of 21 million new types in those three months. Compared to the same period last year, where there were 160,000 registered samples, this is an increase of 43%. The majority of these samples are variants of known malware, mutated by cybercriminals to try to stop the antivirus laboratories from detecting the infections.

Who are the big offenders? Trojans continue to be the most common source of infection (71.16%), with 76.25% of users infected by this type of malware. Among the main threats the study investigated was the use of Cryptolocker and how cybercriminals have begun to reuse an old technique to infect users, one which was first seen 20 years ago. It involved infecting users via a macro in Office documents, especially Word. To complete this attack, the criminals included a blurred image that could only be seen if the user activated the macros. Once users do this, they are infected.

With cyber hackers looking at businesses as it is relatively easy target to steal information from, the security of an entire company is at risk, warns PandaLabs. For those who have yet to put the right levels of security in place right across their organisations, this might well be the time!


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Brian Wall, Editor
Computing Security

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