Quick Heal Detects ‘Cerber Ransomware’ Delivered from an Indian Bank’s Website

Quick Heal has been constantly monitoring the website since 20^th of March, 2017 and according to the latest findings (as we share this information), the Cosmos Bank website is still infected.

Websites have become easy targets for malware writers to spread malware and it is not uncommon for a website to be compromised by more than one type of malware. Exploit Kits which have surfaced during the past 10 years are more intelligently designed software kits that run on the users/victim’s machine and gathers information from the victim’s machine, finds a vulnerability, determines the appropriate exploit and delivers it on the machine usually by drive-by-downloads and starts executing the malware.

As per the information gathered by Quick Heal labs; malware launched by the RIG Exploit Kit are not focused on any particular website or industry. Such campaign based exploit kits, especially; the RIG Exploit Kit targets individual users.

Sharing an insight into the ‘Cerber Ransomware’ detection, Sanjay Katkar, MD & CTO, Quick Heal Technologies Limited said; “At Quick Heal, we constantly monitor the ever-evolving threat landscape and analyze the detected threats in our labs.” He further added; “Ransomware remains a major and rapidly growing threat even in 2017. Quick Heal has been actively monitoring the threat landscape for new ransomwares and their propagation techniques as well as the activities of the existing ransomware and has been capturing this data in its quarter and annual threat reports. To take corrective and timely action against it, we have included the ‘Anti Ransomware feature’ in all our offerings.”

According to Quick Heal’s Annual Threat Report 2016, it has been observed that ransomware detections on Windows desktops have gone up by 92% from the year before. Reportedly, 14 new Windows ransomware families were discovered in 2016, cementing the fact that ransomware attacks are only increasing. With increased usage of Android devices, malware targeting them have also grown at an enormous rate. Mobile ransomware on Android platform has clocked a 450% increase from Q1 to Q4 in 2016 while mobile banking Trojan has shown 110% rise. It has also been found that detections of almost all the vulnerability types have been higher in 2016 when compared with those in 2015.