The recently published Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2018 shows there has been a 43% increase in ransomware detections and a 44% increase in backdoor detections in the first 10 months of 2018, highlighting the growing threat from malware.
Kaspersky Lab is now handling 346,000 new malicious files every day and has so far detected more than 21.64 million malicious objects in 2018.
Backdoor detections increased from 2.27 million to 3.26 million in 2018 and ransomware detections are up from 2.2 million detections to 3.13 million. Backdoors account for 3.7% of malicious files analyzed by Kaspersky Lab and ransomware accounts for 3.5%.
The biggest cyberthreat in 2018 is banking Trojans, which make up more than half of all malicious file detections. The main threats are the Zbot Trojan, which was used in 26.3% of attacks, followed by the Nymaim Trojan (19.8%), and the SpyEye backdoor (14.7%). 7 of the top ten most popular malware families were banking Trojans. the remaining three were backdoors.
Financial crime, such as the theft of banking credentials and credit card numbers, makes up the bulk of attacks, although APT groups tend to concentrate on corporate data theft.
There were fewer new ransomware families developed in 2018 than 2017, but even though there has been a fall in ransomware development, the risk of attack is still significant. The worst month of the year for ransomware attacks was September, when 132,047 instances were seen. Over the past ten months, 11 new ransomware families have been detected and there have been 39,842 modifications made to existing ransomware variants. According to Kaspersky Lab, in the past year, 220,000 corporate users and 27,000 SMB users have been infected with ransomware and had files encrypted.
WannaCry variants were the most commonly used, accounting for 29.3% of infections, followed by generic ransomware (11.4%), and GandCrab ransomware (6.67%).
Banking Trojans and malicious software designed to attack ATMs and POS systems will continue to be major threats in 2019, according to the report.