- Malware and potentially unwanted applications (PUAs) have become overwhelmingly polymorphic, with 97% of malware morphing to become unique to a specific endpoint device. By changing attributes to evade detection, polymorphic threats pose a major problem for traditional, signature-based security approaches, which often fail to discover singular variants.
- Approximately 50 percent of Webroot users experienced a first contact with a zero-day phishing site, as compared to approximately 30 percent in 2014. This data indicates that zero-day phishing attacks are becoming the hacker’s choice for stealing identities.
- Technology companies, including Google, Apple and Facebook, were targeted by more than twice as many phishing sites as financial institutions, such as PayPal, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America. These tech companies are targeted because the same login credentials are often used to access many other websites, resulting in multiple compromised accounts with each phishing victim.
- 100,000 net new malicious IP addresses were created per day in 2015, a significant increase from the 2014 average of 85,000 a day indicating cybercriminals rely less on the same list of IPs, and are expanding to new IPs to avoid detection.
- The U.S. continues to have the most malicious IP addresses of all countries. In 2015, it accounted for over 40 percent of all malicious IP addresses, a significant increase from 31 percent of malicious addresses in 2014. Top countries hosting 75 percent of malicious IPs include the U.S., China, Japan, Germany, and the UK.
- As with malicious IP addresses, malicious URLs are largely hosted in the U.S. (30 percent), followed by China (11 percent). Furthermore, the U.S. is by far the largest host of phishing sites, with 56 percent of sites within its borders.
- In the second half of 2015, 52 percent of new and updated apps were unwanted or malicious—a significant increase over the first half of 2014, when only 21 percent were unwanted or malicious.
See the attached full threat brief for more details.
