Category: Analysis

New threat actor: Spanish-speaking attackers targeting government institutions, energy, oil & gas companies and other high-profile victims via cross-platform malware toolkit Kaspersky Lab’s security research team announced the discovery of “The Mask” (aka Careto), an advanced Spanish-language speaking threat actor that has been involved in global cyber-espionage operations since at least 2007. What makes The Mask special is the complexity of the toolset used by the attackers. This includes an extremely sophisticated malware, a rootkit, a bootkit, Mac OS X and Linux versions and possibly versions for Android and iOS…

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PC Market in Germany, France and U.K. Showed Single-Digit Decline in Fourth Quarter of 2013 PC shipments in Western Europe totaled 14.7 million units in the fourth quarter of 2013, a decline of 4.4 percent compared with the same period in 2012, according to Gartner, Inc. (see Table 1). All PC segments in Western Europe decreased. Mobile and desktop PC shipments declined 6.5 percent and 0.3 percent, respectively. PC shipments in the professional PC market declined 1.7 percent, while the consumer PC market fell seven percent in the fourth quarter…

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Could cyber crime be even more damaging than floods to the country’s key industries? A Government summit suggests they might. Inside the Enterprise: As waves and wind lashed the south west of England, the Government convened its COBRA emergency committee to organise a response this week. But elsewhere in Whitehall, another group of senior officials met to discuss another, potential, disaster: a cyber attack on the UK’s national infrastructure. The summit, hosted by Business Secretary Vince Cable, and the director general of GCHQ, Sir Ian Lobban, brought together the industry regulators…

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The experts at Kaspersky Lab have summarized spammer activity for 2013: The proportion of spam in email flows was 69.6% in 2013, which is 2.5 percentage points lower than the previous year The percentage of emails with malicious attachments was 3.2% – 0.2 percentage points lower than in 2012 32.1% of phishing attacks targeted social networks The biggest sources of spam were China (23%) and the USA (18%) The proportion of spam in email traffic continues to fall – in the last three years the share of unsolicited messages has…

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More than 60% of IT decision makers feel that not enough time or money is available to develop IT security policies. As a result, barely half of the companies feel that they have highly-organized, systematic processes to deal with threats. These findings emerged from the recent Global Corporate IT Security Risks 2013 survey conducted by B2B International for Kaspersky Lab in 2013 among business representatives around the world. The situation is especially poor in the educational industry, where only 28% of organizations are confident that they have sufficient investment in IT security policies.…

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New research reports from both Gartner and IDC have revealed that PC shipments went down 10 percent in 2013, the largest yearly decline on record for the PC industry. This marks the seventh consecutive quarter of falling PC shipments, as consumers continue their move away from personal computers totablets and smart phones as their preferred way of staying in touch and doing business. Mobile devices have become the primary screens of influence on buyer behavior.  Mobile behavior is deeply embedded in the daily life of consumers, and enterprises that hope to…

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