More Cyber-Crooks After Money More

Hang on to your money belt because in a recent report, PandaLabs has revealed a new and disturbing trend -- 72 percent of the malware detected in the third quarter of 2006 was designed for obtaining money.

Adware and spyware were the threats most frequently detected by Panda ActiveScan, accounting for 41 percent of all detections. Both spyware and adware are related to advertising, as they aim to gather personal data about the online store websites users visit, in order to offer them products and services that adapt to their preferences. This practice is illegal if carried out without the affected user’s consent, as it involves a violation of their privacy for commercial purposes.

According to Luis Corrons, director of PandaLabs: "Financial motives are determining the activity of threat creators almost exclusively now. These are professional criminals who create malicious code not to achieve notoriety or show their programming skills, but simply to get money. We believe that this trend will not only be maintained in the future, but it will increase further. In this situation, it is essential to keep one’s guard up at all times and use all technological means of protection at hand."

The report, which is freely available for download, also points out other interesting issues about computer security in the third quarter of 2006, such as the impact of the new software vulnerabilities detected in Microsoft products, threats associated to "social websites" such as MySpace, or the new ways in which cyber-crooks use Google to distribute their creations.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 03:50 PM  Permalink