Cryptocurrencies

Malware variety grows by 13.7% in 2019 due to web skimmers

Kaspersky’s web antivirus solution has identified a 13.7% rise in unique malicious objects compared to last year, with a total of 24.6 million being found.

The growth has been attributed to a staggering 187% rise in web skimmer files, while other threats such as back doors and banking Trojans also grew.

However, the presence of malicious cryptocurrency miners has fallen by 50%, most likely due to the lack of interest in cryptocurrencies over the year.

Around 85% of web threats were detected as malicious URLs, which now find themselves on Kaspersky’s blacklist.

“The volume of online attacks has been growing for years, but in 2019 we saw a clear shift from certain types of attacks that are becoming ineffective to the ones focused on gaining clear profit from users,” said Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky, head of anti-malware research at Kaspersky.

“This is partly due to users becoming more aware of the threats and how to avoid them, and organisations steadily becoming more responsible.”

He continued: “A good example is miners, which have lost their popularity due to lower profitability and cryptocurrencies’ fight against covert mining.

“This year we also witnessed growth in zero-day exploits, showing products remain vulnerable and are used by attackers for sophisticated attacks, and this trend is likely to continue in the future.”

For more news, guides, and cryptocurrency analysis, click here.

Oliver Knight

Londoner ‘Ollie’ graduated from Birmingham City University with a journalism degree in 2016. He combines his writing with his love of crypto and blockchain here at Coin Rivet, saying “It disrupts well-established institutions (banks) while giving an avenue to the less fortunate to achieve financial freedom.” Like all true Londoners, his pet hate is… “People standing on the left-hand side of the escalators on the Tube!”.

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