New Delhi (The Statesman/ANN) - Sociopolitical upheavals around the world gave cyber criminals new social-engineering campaign material, equipping them to penetrate or infect users and networks in order to access victim's data, said the Security Roundup Report of Trend Micro Q1 2012.
The report also noted that cyber criminals who launch advanced persistent threats (APTs) will often keep track of the different attacks within a campaign in order to determine which individual attack compromised a specific victim's network. The Luckycat campaign, in particular, attacked a diverse set of targets using a variety of malware, some of which have been linked to other cyber-espionage campaigns. New social networking site, Pinterest, gained not just popularity but also notoriety.
Site users were drawn into "re-pinning" a Starbucks logo to get supposed gift cards but instead got malware.
This quarter's top spam-sending countries included: India (20 per cent), Indonesia (13 per cent), South Korea (12 per cent), and Russia (10 per cent).
Trend Micro in its quarterly security roundup found 5000 new malicious Android apps during the period.
"The number of targeted attacks has dramatically increased. Unlike largely indiscriminate attacks that focus on stealing credit card and banking information associated with cybercrime, targeted attacks noticeably differ and are better characterised as 'cyber espionage'," it said.