Cybersecurity team at security service edge provider, Netskope, published the Netskope Cloud and Threat Report: Global Cloud and Malware Trends, as a result of the report, it was discovered phishing downloads rose 450% over the past 12 months, and highlighted that hackers are using search engine optimization (SEO) to boost the ranking of the malicious PDF files on search engines.
According to the analysis, majority of the malware was downloaded from within the same geographical location as its victim in order to avoid geofencing filters. Therefore, Most malware downloaded by victims in North America were from website hosted in North America .
This report also helped in revealing some important findings. Trojans are malicious software that misleads users of its true intent continue to be effective, with 77 percent of malware downloads being Trojans.
There is no single Trojan family that is widely dominant, with the top 10 families responsible for only 13 percent of malware downloads.
Cyber criminals use a combination of the Internet and the cloud to attack their victims, as 53 percent of malware downloads come from traditional websites and the rest from cloud-based collaboration and webmail applications. Here, attackers can send messages to their victims via email, direct messages, comments, and shared documents.
EXE and DLL files account for 46 percent of the global malware downloads, while malicious Microsoft Office files have returned to preload Emotet levels and also responsible for nine percent of the total malware downloads.
The use off search engine optimization (SEO) will increase the ranking of malicious website or PDF which increases the legitimacy also coming with a lot of traffic.
All security updates of a device should be ensured its taken as priority and the use of updated anti-malware software.
