US Is Still the Biggest Source of Surging Malware Attacks

Contrary to popular perception, a majority of the cyber attacks on US companies originate from inside the country rather than from the outside.
For all the attention placed on state-sponsored actors and cybercrime gangs in Russia, China and East Europe, nearly a third of the IP addresses associated with malicious activity and 48 percent of malicious URLs are US-based a report from security vendor Webroot shows. Over 75 percent of all phishing sites are hosted on servers inside the country, the report noted.
The Webroot report is based on an analysis of information gathered by the company’s BrightCloud threat intelligence service. It showed that malware and the infrastructure for hosting and distributing it, is growing fast.
On average, there are a staggering 12 million malicious IP addresses operating on the Internet on any give day with 85,000 new addresses being launched daily. While the IP addresses come from all over the world, over 30 percent of them are from the US followed by China with 23 percent and Russia with 10 percent.
 When Webroot looked at where malicious URLs are located, Russia and China were barely on the list while the US topped with France in a distance second place.
 “The United States is the number one source of attacks, number one in terms of attack victims and number one in terms of attackers,” said Mike Malloy, executive vice president of products and strategy at Webroot.
 One reason why so many malicious URLs are located in the US could simply be that malicious attackers know that URLs in high-risk countries are automatically blocked by geo-filtering services, he said.
The top five companies impersonated by phishing sites in 2014 were Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple and Dropbox. The reason why phishers have gravitated towards such sites is pretty simple, Malloy says.
“The credentials to these sites are often the master password to a bunch of other applications,” Malloy said. “There are a lot of applications that ask whether you want to log in with your Facebook ID or you Google ID,” he said. By gaining access to the usernames and passwords to these sites, phishers often can unlock numerous other accounts as well, he said.
Somewhat less surprisingly, Webroot research also showed that Internet users are under growing siege from a variety of malware threats. In Dec 2014, the company noted an over 50 percent increase in phishing activity most likely as a result of the holiday season. The company determined that the average Internet user has a 30 percent chance that he or she will fall victim to a phishing attack involving a zero-day threat for which no remediation is available.
Meanwhile, the number of trustworthy mobile applications fell from 52 percent of all applications in 2013 to 28 percent in 2014. About 50 percent were moderately trustworthy, or suspicious, while the remainder were outright malicious or unwanted. The data shows that threats are extremely dynamic in nature and that IP address blacklists need to be updated constantly to keep up with new attacks and attackers, Webroot said.
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