Blackhole Exploit Toolkit 2.0 And Mobile Banking Malware Are Top Trends In AVG’s Q3 Threat Report

AVG Technologies (NYSE: AVG), the provider of Internet and mobile security to 128 million active users, today released its Q3 2012 Community Powered Threat Report. This quarter’s report investigates a number of malicious software developments including the newly launched 2.0 version of the Blackhole Exploit Toolkit, the evolution in malware targeting mobile banking services, a surge in malicious ads targeting social network users and a trick to hide malware inside image files.

Blackhole Exploit Toolkit 2.0

‘Commercial’ toolkit, Blackhole, continues to lead with 63 percent malware market share and almost 76 percent share of the toolkits market. With the ‘release’ of the Blackhole Exploit Toolkit 2.0 in September, it has increased its threat capabilities significantly and is set to grow its market share and impact even further. We can expect to see an upsurge in large scale attacks that will likely be more aggressive as a result of the new evasion techniques introduced in this latest version.

Prior to this in August, AVG Threat Labs identified an explosion of Blackhole attacks that targeted key social networks including Facebook and left users unable to log-on to their accounts or access any games or apps. Cybercriminals coordinated the attacks from multiple external advertising servers, which generated an exceptional increase from 250,000 attacks initially to over 1.6m recorded events within an eight hour period.

“Blackhole is a sophisticated and powerful exploit kit, mainly because it is polymorphic and its code is heavily obfuscated to evade detection by anti-virus solutions. The rapid update capabilities of the kit have also made it challenging for traditional antivirus vendors to track, which are the main reasons it has a high success rate,” said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, Chief Technology Officer at AVG Technologies. “Through our multi-layered security approach with real-time analysis at the endpoint, AVG has been detecting a much higher rate of Blackhole Toolkit-based attacks than other toolkits, as Blackhole’s creator seeks to stay ahead of their competition.”

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