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 2019 State of Malware report: Trojans and cryptominers dominate threat
landscape

Posted: January 23, 2019 by Wendy Zamora
Last updated: January 21, 2019

Each quarter, the Malwarebytes Labs team gathers to share intel, statistics,
and analysis of the tactics and techniques made popular by cybercriminals over
the previous three months. At the end of the year, we synthesize this data into
 one all-encompassing report-the State of Malware report-that aims to follow
the most important threats, distribution methods, and other trends that shaped
the threat landscape.

Our 2019 State of Malware report is here, and it's a doozy.

In our research, which covers January to November 2018 and compares it against
the previous period in 2017, we found that two major malware categories
dominated the scene, with cryptominers positively drenching users at the back
end of 2017 and into the first half of 2018, and information-stealers in the
form of Trojans taking over for the second half of the year.

But that's not all we discovered.

The 2019 State of Malware report follows the top 10 global threats for
consumers and businesses, as well as top threats by region and by corporate
industry verticals. In addition, we followed noteworthy distribution techniques
 for the year, as well as popular scams. Some of our findings include:

    In 2018, we saw a shift in ransomware attack techniques from malvertising
and exploits that deliver ransomware as a payload to targeted, manual attacks.
The shotgun approach was replaced with brute force, as witnessed in the most
successful SamSam campaigns of the year.

    Malware authors pivoted in the second half of 2018 to target organizations
over consumers, recognizing that the bigger payoff was in making victims out of
 businesses instead of individuals. Overall business detections of malware rose
 significantly over the last year-79 percent to be exact-and primarily due to
the increase in backdoors, miners, spyware, and information stealers.

    The fallout from the ShadowBrokers' leak of NSA exploits in 2017 continued,
 as cybercriminals used SMB vulnerabilities EternalBlue and EternalRomance to
spread dangerous and sophisticated Trojans, such as Emotet and TrickBot. In
fact, information stealers were the top consumer and business threat in 2018,
as well as the top regional threat for North America, Latin America, and
Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA).

Finally, our Labs team stared into its crystal ball and predicted top trends
for 2019. Of particular note are the following:

    Attacks designed to avoid detection, like soundloggers, will slip into the
wild.

    Artificial Intelligence will be used in the creation of malicious
executables.

    Movements such as Bring Your Own Security (BYOS) to work will grow as trust
 declines.

    IoT botnets will come to a device near you.

To learn more about top threats and trends in 2018 and our predictions for
2019, download our report from the link below.
2019 State of Malware Report


Regards,

Roger 
--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+