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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024
Mugglehead Magazine
Alternative investment news based in Vancouver, B.C.

Cyber Security

OpenText reveals top five malware threats for 2022

Threat intelligence experts from OpenText Security Solutions have ranked the worst malicious malware.

malware
Photo by Ed Hardie via Unsplash

OpenText (NASDAQ:OTEX) (TSX:OTEX) both announced and provided rankings for the nastiest malware threats of 2022 for the fifth straight year.

Threat intelligence experts from OpenText Security Solutions have sifted through the data, analyzed specific behaviours and come up with what malicious malware offerings are the worst.

“The key takeaway from this year’s findings is that malware remains center stage in the threats posed towards individuals, businesses, and governments. Cybercriminals continue to evolve their tactics, leaving the infosec community in a constant state of catch-up. With the mainstream adoption of ransomware payloads and cryptocurrency facilitating payments, the battle will continue. No person, no business—regardless of size—is immune to these threats,” said Muhi Majzoub, executive vice president and chief product officer for OpenText.

OpenText gives organizations the opportunity get insights through information management solutions powered by its proprietary cloud platform, OpenText Cloud Editions. Its subsidiary, OpenText Security Solutions, helps organizations protect themselves against cyber-threats. Its program suite includes titles like like Webroot Security, Carbonite Data Management, BrightCloud Threat Intelligence and EnCase Digital Forensics to Threat Response.

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This year’s list pushes payloads into different malware categories, but it’s important to note that many groups contract work from others. This gives each group the chance to specialize and perfect their respective attack vector and payload.

The 2022 malware hall of shame:

  1. Emotet is the most successful botnet in existence. Its job is to send malspam campaigns out to billions of emails per day. Once someone clicks on a link, it gets a foothold on a victim’s computer and follows-up with malware that moves laterally to compromise the rest of the environment before delivering ransomware.
  2. Lockbit is this year’s most successful ransomware group. It’s been around for three years operating as a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group. It steals data and holds it for ransom, threatening to leak it. This year it added a new dimensional called triple extortion, which includes a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack to threaten an entire system.
  3. Conti is another example of RaaS malware. The group behind it released a statement of support for their leak site for the Russian government in February. Not soon after a twitter account called  Conti leaks leaked Conti’s internal chats for almost two years. Conti took the leak site down. Now Conti has rebranded into multiple operations, including HelloKitty, BlackCat and BlackByte.
  4. Qbot is probably the oldest info-stealing trojan presently operating. It travels through the network, infecting the environment and allows access to as much data as possible to steal for extortion purposes while preparing for the final stage of ransomware delivery.
  5. Like Qbot, Valyria is a strain of former banking trojan turned into malspam botnet with email attachments. This works by turning into malicious scripts that starts an infection chain leading to ransomware. What’s trickiest about Valyria is its complex components and detection evasion capabilities.

Analysis also discovered that there’s been almost a 1100 per cent increase in phishing during the first four months of 2022, compared to last year. This corresponds to the end of the ‘hacker holiday,’ or hacker rest period after the holiday season.

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