Security giant Kaspersky Labs reports it has recorded a high level of malicious activity, having blocked over 209 million network attacks in December.
Kaspersky says it has, over the holiday period, prevented over 67 million attempts to infect computers via the Web; detected and neutralised over 196 million malicious programs; and registered almost 71 million heuristic verdicts.
According to the security vendor, social engineering and the exploitation of vulnerabilities in legitimate software remained the primary tactics driven by cyber criminals.
URL danger
In a report, Kaspersky states that users are increasingly using Internet addresses that have been shortened with the help of special URL shortening services, such as Twitter, and they don't always know that malicious links may be lurking among them.
“In December, the top trends on Twitter's main page included a number of entries with links that had been shortened using popular services such as bit.ly and alturl.com. After several redirects, these links eventually led to infected Web sites,” states Kaspersky.
In another development, the authors of fake anti-virus programs have been busy perfecting their tactics, so much so that two of their creations made it into December's Top 20 malicious programs detected on the Internet - in 18th and 20th places.
Malicious Trojans
According to Kaspersky, two representatives of Trojan-Downloader Java.OpenConnection were among the top 20 malicious programs detected on the Internet in December in second and seventh places.
The company says: “At the height of their activity, the number of computers on which these programs were detected in a 24-hour period exceeded 40 000.”
Topping the list of Web-based threats, well ahead of its nearest rival, was the adware program AdWare.Win32.HotBar.dh. “For the first time ever, a malicious PDF file that makes use of Adobe XML forms has made it into the Top 20 online threats,” notes the security company.
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