02 Dec 07 Kaspersky Lab announces the publication of Malware Evolution: July - September 2007

Below is a summary of some recent developments of malicious malware. The
link to the full report will take you to further in-depth information.

Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management
solutions, announces the publication of Malware Evolution: July -
September 2007. The authors of the article, Alexander Gostev and Vitaly
Kamluk, are both virus analysts at the company.

In the quarterly report the Kaspersky Lab analysts talk about the
growing trend of new threats that, for the most part, are emerging as a
concentrated flow of uniform Trojan programs and whose appearance no
longer arouse the mass public discussion that they once did. The lack of
originality and the scale of activity, according to the analysts, points
to a greater professionalism among cybercriminals - attracting the
attention of the press or law enforcement agencies is no longer their
main aim.

However, the greed of the criminals has exposed the general public to
the vagaries of malware. This was underlined by the appearance of the
latest Trojan blackmailer and with Internet resources whose sites saw
the simultaneous installation of multiple botnets. The situation
surrounding the Storm botnet also caught the attention of the public as
it exceeded 2 million infected computers, and finally there was the
appearance of Trojan spyware aimed at stealing the data of users with
Russian software for accessing the stock exchange system online.

The report describes in detail the work of a virus expert, using the
example of the latest version of Gpcode.ai, a Trojan that encrypts user
data. Those reading the report get a rare insight into the world of
Russian-speaking cybercriminals and how they interact with one another.

During the investigation into Gpcode.ai, a number of interesting factors
came to light. Firstly, it became clear that there was ‘universal’ code
that was used in a range of malicious programs with differing functions.
Secondly, the analysts identified new links between different families
of malicious code which initially appeared to have nothing in common.
Thirdly, the Russian-speaking cybercriminal community is now using a
standard package consisting of two Trojans and the botnet controlled by
them.

The Kaspersky Lab experts concluded that the demand for the creation and
distribution of Trojans was encouraging the cybercrime industry to
continue evolving.

The full report can be found at Viruslist.com:

Tags: Antivirus, Security