Caught! the malwares attacking the FSI

AUSTIN: In a newly released report titled Websense Security Labs Reveals Top Cyber Threat Trends in 2015 Financial Services Drill-Down Report, Websense has examined the current state of cyber threats and data-stealing attacks against financial services institutions (FSIs).

Some significant findings include:

• Financial services industry encounters security incidents 300 percent more frequently than other industries: Under constant barrage by cyber criminals, the number of attacks against the segment dwarfs the average volume of attacks against other industries by a 3:1 ratio. Further, the sophistication and persistent nature of the attacks continues to challenge security professionals.

• Thirty three percent of all lure stage attacks target financial services: Hackers are spending a huge amount of resources targeting financial services with a disproportionate amount of reconnaissance and lures. One in three incidents identified as lures are directed at this industry.

• Credential stealing and data theft are the primary objectives of criminals: As one would expect with financial services, data theft and credential stealing attacks are paramount to the attackers.

When analyzing the top threats facing this industry, researchers noted that most had some data and credential-stealing elements.

By volume, the top threats in the finance sector include: Rerdom; Vawtrack; Geodo. Interestingly, the Geodo malware, with its own credential-stealing email worm, is seen 400 percent more often in finance than others.

Fraudsters switch-up campaigns frequently to outfox banking security measures:

Obfuscation and search engine optimization poisoning continues to be more prevalent in attacks against financial services.

Patterns in attack campaigns shift on a month-to-month basis, including huge spikes in malicious redirection and obfuscation detected in a wave of attacks in March 2015. This highlights an attack methodology designed for campaigns to be harder to detect and analyze by those charged with securing the finance sector.

In addition, cyber criminals maintain a constant barrage of low-level attacks to keep security pros occupied dealing with a tremendous volume of background noise while targeted attacks are simultaneously occurring.

Financial services ranks third among industries for targeted Typosquatting:

Websense researchers have seen an increase in the use of typosquatted domains in targeted attacks against financial services, usually combined with strong social engineering tactics.

The report also examined a possibility that the increasingly global economy and cyber insurance adoption may be hindering effective security measures, and provides more metrics, data and visualizations of attacks against financial services.

“The famous quote, attributed to bank robber, Willie Sutton that he robbed banks because that's where the money is applies to cybercriminals as well,” said Carl Leonard, Principal Security Analyst, Websense. “For years, this industry has been under attack by highly specialized groups of criminals. By analyzing the actions and attack patterns prominent and anomalous to this industry, we can share this knowledge to more effectively protect our customers’ data and assets.”