Bankers attacked 430,000 users in the first half of 2019

Kaspersky Lab experts presented a report on financial threats in the first half of 2019.

As it turned out, in the first six months of 2019, banking Trojans attacked 430,000 private and corporate users around the world, which is 7% more than in the same period in 2018.

“We assume that in accordance with the trend of recent years, financial malware will increase its activity by the end of the year, and we recommend companies to make sure that their security solutions detect and block the action of common banking Trojans”, – said Oleg Kupreev, an anti-virus expert from “Kaspersky Labs“.

The RTM Trojan continued to be most active, primarily aiming at employees of small companies responsible for financial reporting: in the first six months of the year, 40% of attacks were carried out with its help.

The second most active financial malware was Emotet, which can penetrate the system as part of emails. It accounted for 15% of attacks. In Russia, Emotet was in third place (3%), and Zbot came in second, with the help of which almost every tenth financial attack (9%) on a corporate device was carried out in our country from January to June.

Read also: Cybercriminals from the Bans Turla armed with new malware

The Trickster Trojan (12%) on the third place among representatives of financial malware.

Researchers note that bankers are dangerous for companies because the corporate environment usually includes many Internet-connected devices, the compromise of one of which can endanger the entire network.

Most often, financial malware spreads through spam and fishing websites. In the first half of the year, Kaspersky Lab recorded 339,000 fishing attacks carried with using fake pages of large banks.
To protect against financial threats, Kaspersky recommends users:

1. Install applications only from trusted sources – such as official stores;
2. Check what access rights and permissions the application requests – if they do not correspond to what the program is designed to do then it should be questioned;
3. Do not follow links in spam messages and do not open documents attached to them;
4. Use a reliable security solution, including on mobile devices.

To protect your business from financial malware, Kaspersky security specialists advise:

1. Introducing cybersecurity awareness training for your employees, particularly those who are responsible for accounting, to teach them how to distinguish phishing attacks: do not open attachments or click on links from unknown or suspicious addresses
2. Installing the latest updates and patches for all of the software you use
3. Forbidding the installation of programs from unknown sources