Countries most hit by financial Trojans: India at 3rd place

PUNE: India has moved up the rankings for countries with the most number of financial Trojan infections as per the latest Symantec Financial Threats 2015 research.

India has gone from rank 5 in 2014 to 3 in the 2015 report, coming in behind the USA and Germany. It has jumped four places in the global rankings for the most infections since 2013. Over 60, 000 computers in India were compromised with financial Trojans in 2015.

Although global detections dropped, financial Trojans are becoming far more capable and criminals are increasingly targeting institutions directly.

Trojans remain a popular way for cybercriminals to make money, by defrauding customers of online banking services. The research extracted configuration files from 656 active malware samples. Within those files, the company found 2,048 URL patterns that show that the Trojans are targeting customers of 547 organizations in 49 countries.

The total number of financial Trojan detections continued to decrease in 2015, with a 73 percent drop compared to the previous year.

The other countries in the top five are Japan and United Kingdom at number four and five respectively.

The research also concluded that while there has been a drop in the number of financial Trojans being detected, they are becoming more capable and will continue to pose a threat.

Globally, the financial sector was the highest targeted sector in January 2016 with 40.2 percent of all spear-phishing attacks, primarily through malicious spam email attachments. The trend of using office documents containing malicious macros as dropper continued in 2015. Dridex has emerged as one of the most dangerous financial threats over the past year, targeting a total of 315 different institutions.

In its Internet Security Threat Report Vol. 20, Symantec had revealed an increase in targeted attacks aimed at the BFSI sector in India that went up to 17.1 percent in 2014, from 11.1 percent in 2013.

Source: techgig.com