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Highly targeted malware attacks a growing trend, Kaspersky says

A smaller-than-usual year-over-year increase in malicious files doesn't mean criminals are slacking off — it means they're becoming more selective with their attacks.

December 4, 2014

You might suppose that a smaller-than-usual yearly increase in detected malware files would be a good thing. But that's not necessarily so.

Every day the Kaspersky Lab antimalware research team process more than 1.6 million different files — almost 20 percent of them considered dangerous, the company said today in a news release.

This represents only a 3.17 percent increase in malicious files detected this year compared with 2013, which posted a 50 percent increase from the previous year.

However, according to Kaspersky Lab experts, this sharp reduction in the growth rate simply reflects a change in tactics used by criminals to infect PCs.

Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky, head of antimalware research at Kaspersky, explained the shift:

We are now observing a very interesting trend in the malicious landscape. More and more often criminals use spear-phishing emails to target a very specific group. Previously this technique was almost exclusively used by advanced threat operators but now spear-phishing has been commercialized for use by less skillful cybercriminals. This allows them to perform smaller and less noticeable attacks. This makes their attacks less suspicious.

But not sufficiently less suspicious to go unnoticed by Kaspersky, it seems.