South Africa remains one of the top five countries in the world in terms of phishing attack volumes and financial losses, right behind the UK, US, Canada and India.
Moran Adrian, Cyber Solutions Project Manager at RSA, the Security Division of EMC, says the number of Trojan attacks is increasing, even though we see less commercial malware offerings in the underground forums.
In matters of phishing, Adrian mentioned the fact that cyber criminals are opportunistic in a sense that they are changing their attack methods seasonally. In South Africa, for example, tax season is high risk for many people. Cyber criminals perform phishing attacks on the SARS Web site, send a fake tax refund advice to the victim, and take the tax refund for themselves.
Similarly, there have been cases of fraud methods especially for the summer time; fake holiday rentals, fake flight bookings and even fake discounts on products which will never be delivered.
Moving forward to Trojan malware advancement, a remarkable trend is an account takeover attack. "Account takeover attacks are also on the rise; financial losses from these attacks are increasing at about 10%-20% per year," says Adrian. These attacks are designed to take over the victim's bank account in order to empty it of funds.
With PC malware in mind, mobile malware is on the rise as well. From 2011 to 2012, malware on the Android operating system increased by a staggering 35 000%. "This is a real threat - as it took Android malware only four years to reach volumes that took PC-based malware almost 14 years to achieve,"Adrian says. "The malware primarily consists of premium number abusing, adware and data stealers."
Another emerging threat is hacktivism, which started gaining momentum in 2011. Hacktivism became a major disruptive threat and a digital outlet for expressing controversial opinions. Hacktivists generally aim to disrupt business, causing either direct or indirect financial losses, and of course, reputational damage. Their tool of choice is DDoS (distributed denial of service) capable of bringing down Web sites for hours, days and sometimes weeks. They are also known to publish personal data relating to senior executives (known as d0xing) and dump large amounts of data from their target's databases, again in an attempt to disrupt and cause reputational damage.
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