In its latest quarterly report on IT security threats, entitled Malware Evolution: April – June 2007, an absence of new ideas and fundamentally new types of threat is apparent. Meanwhile cyber criminals are shown to be moving to assembly-line production of primitive malicious programs.
The new quarterly report from Kaspersky Lab focuses on major issues affecting the evolution of the Internet and new technologies and vulnerabilities that pose a threat to Internet users around the world.
The report tracks the movement of the “guerilla” cyberwar, during which Russian and Estonian websites were attacked. Furthermore, it elaborates on the blows suffered by the parties in conflict, and the report examines the problem of identifying the masterminds and executors of these kinds of attacks in the future, especially in the context of international relations.
Kaspersky Lab analysts state that another important trend is the continuing evolution of mobile threats, “In the past quarter, the first SMS Trojan for Symbian was detected,” comments Alexander Gostev, Senior Virus Analyst at Kaspersky Lab, on the Trojan that sends text messages to fee-based numbers. The report also examines the security of the relatively new Apple iPhone. Gostev continues, “The popularity of the iPhone, the availability of documentation for its operating system and the existence of vulnerabilities in the system all mean that a threat for this smartphone is already a reality, although there are also reasons to be optimistic.”