In a trend that should really be no big surprise virus activity has been dropping in favour of trojans and spyware. Why, you ask? Simple. Money is the motivator. Gone are the wild west days of the furry toothed hacker living in their parent’s basement. Being replaced by the greed. Michael Douglas said it best in the movie Wall Street. “Greed is good”. In context that makes sense. The race to improve position in life. Now the nefarious types lurking in the dark places on the interweb are putting their own twist on this passage. We have seen ransomware that would lock up data and demand payment. We have seen systems backdoored in the worst way such as the CardSystems Solutions Inc. breach. Separate research from both Fortinet and Sophos has noted this disturbing trend.
“While email worms occupy the top spots, it’s clear that Trojans represent by far the most prominent threat to IT security,” said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos.”Trojans are constantly being fine-tuned by hackers to catch out specific targets. As they are likely to be more difficult to identify, there’s a danger that more individuals will make the mistake of clicking on an unsolicited attachment or a dubious weblink.”
Gone are the days of malware such as the Stoned virus from September 1990. The message “Your PC is now stoned” has been replaced by, “Your PC is now stoned. Gimmie your freakin wallet”