Trend Micro Reports Q1 2012 APAC Security Findings

Trend Micro Reports Q1 2012 APAC Security Findings

Trend Micro recently unveiled its Q1 2012 APAC security roundup report, listing spam, mobile, and Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) as top security risks, while social media and vulnerabilities remain critical sources of exploits and malware.

The report also noted a significant shift from “smash-and-grab incidents" to long-term, ongoing targeted attacks that often leverage social engineering and malware, including evidence of black hole exploit campaigns that trick users into clicking on sophisticated-looking spam, only to be redirected to landings pages with black hole exploit kits.

Given the huge Android user base, the increase in attacks on the mobile platform is hardly surprising. In fact, popular spy tools apps are among the 17 malicious apps in Google Play that enjoyed more than 700,000 downloads so far.

“We identified nearly 5,000 new malicious Android apps just this quarter,” said Myla Pilao, Director of Marketing Communications at TrendLabs. “Cybercriminal use of mobile has evolved from the past hit-and-miss approach to more aggressive ways of exacting information.”

Furthermore, Asia’s growing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend also opens the mobile landscape as well as APAC users to maximum security risks.

“Though many organizations are still uncomfortable with consumerization, security and data breach incidents in 2012 will force them to face BYOD-related challenges.” added Pilao.

APT campaigns also continue to hound the APAC threat landscape. The drastic change of command and control (C&C) servers hosting from known malicious ISPs to compromised machines associated with the original target makes the APT campaign harder to filter and detect.

During this quarter, the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network, a cloud computing infrastructure, protected Trend Micro customers against a total of: 15.3 billion spam, 338.4 thousand malware, and 1.3 billion malicious URLs.

According to Pilao, “Trend Micro Deep Security and Trend Micro Deep Discovery protect virtualized networks and works against APTs, respectively. With the Smart Protection Network, we are able to deliver next-generation security to automatically protect digital information wherever users connect.”

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