Ransomware Up, Spam Down: Seven Security Trends

There has been no summer slowdown for security stats, but it’s not all bad news either. That’s what McAfee Labs found in its 2Q15 Threats Report.

On the whole, the total volume of malware in the McAfee Labs malware zoo at the end of the second quarter topped 433 million, for a 12 percent quarterly gain.

At 17 percent quarterly growth, the pace of growth in McAfee Labs’ mobile malware zoo is a bit faster than the total overall malware rate.

Regional mobile malware infection rates are not uniform around the world. The highest infection rates in the second quarter were reported in Africa and Asia, while the lowest were found in Europe and Australia.

Ransomware is a form of malware that locks a user’s system until a fee, or “ransom,” is paid to an attacker. In the second quarter of 2015, McAfee Labs detected 58 percent more new ransomware samples than the first quarter of 2015.

According to McAfee Labs, the Wapomi botnet was the most prevalent botnet it detected in the second quarter, coming in at 19.9 percent.

One particularly strong metric in the second quarter was the growth of new spam addresses (URLs) and their associated domains. McAfee Labs reported a 380 percent increase in new spam URLs for the second quarter.

While many security indicators tracked by McAfee show a rising trend, three is one area that is continuing to decline. That area is the volume of global spam, which hit a multiyear peak in the third quarter of 2014 and has been in decline the following three quarters, including the most recent second quarter of 2015.