Check Point Research: Global Impact of Cryptominers Doubles in H1 2018; Hackers Increasingly Target Cloud Infrastructures

SAN CARLOS, Calif., July 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. (NASDAQ:CHKP), a leading provider of cyber-security solutions globally, today released its “Cyber Attack Trends: 2018 Mid-Year Report,” revealing that cyber-criminals are aggressively targeting organizations using cryptomining malware to develop illegal revenue streams. Meanwhile, cloud infrastructures appear to be the growing target among threat actors.   

Between January and June 2018, the number of organizations impacted by cryptomining malware doubled to 42%, compared to 20.5% in the second half of 2017. Cryptomining malware enables cybercriminals to hijack the victim’s CPU or GPU power and existing resources to mine cryptocurrency, using as much as 65% of the end-user’s CPU power.  The top three most common malware variants seen in H1 2018 were all cryptominers.

In a new trend, Check Point detected an increasing number of attacks targeting cloud infrastructures. With organizations moving more of their IT estates and data to cloud environments, criminals are turning to the cloud to exploit its vast computational power and multiply their profits.

The “Cyber Attack Trends: 2018 Mid-Year Report” gives a detailed overview of the cyber-threat landscape in the top malware categories – cryptominers, ransomware, banking and mobile. These findings are based on data drawn from Check Point’s ThreatCloud intelligence between January and June 2018, highlighting the key tactics cyber-criminals are using to attack businesses.

Maya Horowitz, Threat Intelligence Group Manager at Check Point commented: “The first half of this year saw criminals continue the trend we observed at the end of 2017, and take full advantage of stealthy cryptomining malware to maximize their revenues.  We’ve also seen increasingly sophisticated attacks against cloud infrastructures and multi-platform environments emerging.  These multi-vector, fast-moving, large-scale Gen V attacks are becoming more and more frequent, and organizations need to adopt a multi-layered cybersecurity strategy that prevents these attacks from taking hold of their networks and data.” 

Key Malware Trends in H1 2018
Check Point researchers detected a number of key malware trends during the period, including:

• Cryptocurrency Miners Evolve – In 2018, cryptominers have been upgraded with vastly improved capabilities, becoming more sophisticated and even destructive. Motivated by a clear interest to increase the percentage of computational resources leveraged and be even more profitable, cryptominers today target anything that could be perceived as being in their way. Cryptominers have also highly evolved recently to exploit high profile vulnerabilities and to evade sandboxes and security products in order to expand their infection rates.
• Hackers Move to the Cloud – So far this year, there have been a number of sophisticated techniques and tools exploited against cloud storage services. Several cloud-based attacks, mainly those involving data exfiltration and information disclosure, derived from poor security practices, including credentials left available on public source code repositories or the use of weak passwords. Cryptominers are also, targeting cloud infrastructures to exploit its computational power and multiply profits for threat actors.
• Multi-platform Attacks on the Rise – Up until the end of 2017, multi-platform malware was rare. However, the rise in the number of consumer connected devices and the growing market share of non-Windows operating systems has led to an increase in cross-platform malware. Campaign operators implement various techniques in order to take control over the campaigns’ different infected platforms. 
  
• Mobile Malware Spread via the Supply Chain – In the first half of this year, there has been several incidences where mobile malware that has not been downloaded from a malicious URL, but instead arrived already installed within the device. In addition, there was an increase in applications readily available on app stores that were actually malware under disguise, including Banking Trojans, Adware and sophisticated remote access Trojans (RATs).

Top Cryptominers During H1 2018

1. Coinhive (30%) – A cryptominer designed to perform online mining of the Monero cryptocurrency without the user's approval when a user visits a web page.  Coinhive only emerged in September 2017 but has hit 12% of organizations worldwide hit by it.
2. Cryptoloot (23%) – A JavaScript Cryptominer, designed to perform online mining of Monero cryptocurrency when a user visits a web page without the user's approval.
3. JSEcoin (17%) – Web-based Crypto miner designed to perform online mining of Monero cryptocurrency when a user visits a web page without the user's approval.

Top Ransomware During H1 2018

1. Locky (40%) – Ransomware that spreads mainly via spam emails containing a downloader, disguised as a Word or Zip attachment, before installing malware that encrypts the user files.
2. WannaCry (35%) – Ransomware that was spread in a large scale attack in May 2017, utilizing a Windows SMB exploit called EternalBlue, in order to propagate within and between networks.
3. Globeimposter (8%) – Distributed by spam campaigns, malvertising and exploit kits. Upon encryption, the ransomware appends the .crypt extension to each encrypted file.

Top Mobile Malware During H1 2018

1. Triada (51%) – A Modular Backdoor for Android which grants superuser privileges to downloaded malware, as it helps it to get embedded into system processes. Triada has also been seen spoofing URLs loaded in the browser.
2. Lokibot (19%) – A mobile banking Trojan which targets Android smartphones and turns into a Ransomware, upon an attempt of the victim trying to remove its admin privileges.
3. Hidad (10%) – Android malware which repackages legitimate apps and then releases them to a third-party store. It is able to gain access to key security details built into the OS, allowing an attacker to obtain sensitive user data.

Top Banking Malware During H2 2017

1. Ramnit (29%) – A banking Trojan that steals banking credentials, FTP passwords, session cookies and personal data.
2. Dorkbot (22%) - A banking Trojan which steals the victim’s credentials using web-injects, activated as the user tries to login to their banking website.
3. Zeus (14%) – A Trojan that targets Windows platforms and often uses them to steal banking information by man-in-the-browser keystroke logging and form grabbing.

Check Point’s ThreatCloud intelligence is the largest collaborative network to fight cybercrime and delivers threat data and attack trends from a global network of threat sensors. The ThreatCloud database holds over 250 million addresses analyzed for bot discovery, more than 11 million malware signatures and over 5.5 million infected websites, and identifies millions of malware types daily.

A full copy of the report is available from here.

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About Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.
Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (www.checkpoint.com) is a leading provider of cyber security solutions to governments and corporate enterprises globally.  Its solutions protect customers from cyber-attacks with an industry leading catch rate of malware, ransomware and other types of attacks. Check Point offers a multilevel security architecture that defends enterprises’ cloud, network and  mobile device held information, plus the most comprehensive and intuitive one point of control security management system. Check Point protects over 100,000 organizations of all sizes.