MCAFEE LABS REPORT REVIEWS FIVE YEARS OF HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE THREAT EVOLUTION

Intel Security released its McAfee Labs Threats Report: August 2015, which includes a critique of graphics processing unit (GPU) malware claims, an investigation of the top cybercriminal exfiltration techniques, and a five-year retrospective on the evolution of the threat landscape since Intel Corporation’s announcement of the McAfee acquisition.

The five-year threat landscape analysis suggests:

• Intel Security foresaw threats targeting hardware and firmware components and threatening runtime integrity.
• Increasingly evasive malware and long-running attacks did not surprise us but some of the specific tactics and techniques were unimagined five years ago.
• Although the volume of mobile devices has increased even faster than we expected, serious broad-based attacks on those devices has grown much more slowly than we thought.
• We are seeing just the beginnings of attacks and breaches against IoT devices.
• Cloud adoption has changed the nature of some attacks, as devices are attacked not for the small amount of data that they store, but as a path to where the important data resides.
• Cybercrime has grown into a full-fledged industry with suppliers, markets, service providers, financing, trading systems, and a proliferation of business models.
• Businesses and consumers still do not pay sufficient attention to updates, patches, password security, security alerts, default configurations, and other easy but critical ways to secure cyber and physical assets.
• The discovery and exploitation of core Internet vulnerabilities has demonstrated how some foundational technologies are underfunded and understaffed.
• There is growing, positive collaboration between the security industry, academia, law enforcement, and governments to take down cybercriminal operations.

The August2015 report also identified a number of other developments in the second quarter of 2015:

• Ransomware. Ransomware continues to grow very rapidly – with the number of new ransomware samples rising 58% in Q2. The total number of ransomware samples grew 127% from Q2 2014 to Q2 2015. We attribute the increase to fast-growing new families such as CTB-Locker, CryptoWall, and others.
• Mobile slump. The total number of mobile malware samples grew 17% in Q2. But mobile malware infection rates declined about 1% per region this quarter, with the exception of North America, which dropped almost 4%, and Africa, which was unchanged.
• Spam botnets. The trend of decreasing botnet-generated spam volume continued through Q2, as the Kelihos botnet remained inactive. Slenfbot again claims the top rank, followed closely by Gamut, with Cutwail rounding out the top three.
• Suspect URLs. Every hour in Q2 more than 6.7 million attempts were made to entice McAfee customers into connecting to risky URLs via emails, browser searches, etc.
• Infected files. Every hour in Q2 more than 19.2 million infected files were exposed to McAfee customers’ networks.
• PUPs up. Every hour in Q2 an additional 7 million potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) attempted installation or launch on McAfee-protected networks.