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Banks in Brazil, Russia, Italy are those most often attacked by malware

July 8, 2014

For the reporting period of April 19 to May 19, financial institutions in Brazil, Russia and Italy claimed the dubious honor or being most often attacked by financial malware, according to the latest monthly report from Kaspersky Lab.

The security provider said its solutions blocked 126,600 attempts on computers to launch malware capable of stealing money from users of online banking accounts in those three countries. This was more than a third of the total number of users attacked by banking malware worldwide.

As a rule, cybercriminals try to steal users’ bank card details with the help of the specialized Trojan programs. From mid-April to mid-May, Zeus was once again the most widespread banking Trojan. According to Kaspersky research, the program was involved in 198,200 malware attacks on online banking clients. About 82,300 people were attacked by Trojan-Banker.Win32.ChePro and Trojan-Banker.Win32.Lohmys. Malicious programs mainly spread via spam emails with the subject line “Internet bank charges.”

During the reporting period, Kaspersky Lab solutions also blocked 21.5 million phishing attacks, almost 10 percent (2 million) of them targeting users’ bank card details.

The reporting period was marked one particular event that seriously jeopardized the security of online payment systems, namely Heartbleed,  which exploits a vulnerability previously found in the popular encryption library OpenSSL. It is still not known what data was stolen and in what volumes.