The financial sector remained the number one target of cyber attackers during Q2 of this year with 291,800 new mobile malware programmes detected, which is 2.8 times greater than last quarter.
According to Kaspersky Lab’s Q2 cyberthreats report, 51% of web-borne attacks were launched from Russia followed by the US, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Virgin Islands.
The report revealed that the newest Trojan to emerge in the quarter is capable of attacking four times more banking and financial application than its previous version, Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.OpFake.cc
The new Trojan tries to steal a collection of users’ login credentials from mobile banking to attack popular email applications.
Kaspersky said that Singapore was the most targeted country in the quarter, with 5.3% of its users in facing online attacks from banking Trojans.
Singapore was closely followed by Switzerland where 4.2% were targeted by banking Trojans, followed by Brazil and Australia with 4%.
However, when compared to Q1, there were only 5,900,000 notifications about attempted malware attack, which was 800,000 lower than the attempts recorded in Q1.
The security service provider also revealed that during Q2, its analysis team exposed four cyber espionage campaigns; CozyDuke, Naikon, Hellsing and Duqu 2.0. These victimised government agencies, commercial companies and other high-level targets.
Cyber criminals also targeted other economic sectors like nanotechnologies, education, agriculture, and mass media.
Kaspersky Lab Global Research chief security expert Alexander Gostev said: "In Q2 we launched an important initiative called Securing Smart Cities, which aims to help those responsible for developing smart cities to do so without forgetting about cybersecurity.
"If security measures are not planned at the development stage, that could have serious implications later, and retro-fitting security might not be a straightforward task."
