Blended Threats: An execrable concoction of Cyber-age freebooters
Wednesday, December 14th, 2011 | Author:

Malware landscape in today’s time, cease to know any form of boundaries. This boisterous trend is lately catching up as modern malware can now land up through multiple vectors ranging from unsolicited emails to compromised websites and never to forget the ever-favourite social networking sites. Pacing towards the zenith, blended threats have had incredible success at causing infection due to the systematic approach by professional Internet hackers in what has become a highly lucrative industry. The same has been confirmed by Microsoft that has estimated in 2009 that blended threats has been responsible for distributing malware infection among 30% of home PCs and 4% of corporate computers.

A Salver of Choices

Blended threats have become coveted conduit for malware writers to gratify their iffy intents as now they have multiplicity of choices. These range from envenoming search engine results that use popular search terms leading to malicious websites or to social networking sites that enables hackers to promulgate the malicious URL links to contacts by compromising accounts that are legitimate. But it’s still the email that holds high regards among the virus writers. Now no more malicious email attachments, as inserting a seemingly legitimate URL link directing to a malicious website will do all wonders for hackers without any risk of being caught.

The line of attack

It all starts with hacking of a legitimate website by a hacker using automated tools for placing the malware- a radical shift from the conventional approach where the site is developed by the hacker for launching a systemic attack. Next in the line comes the dissemination task where the unsolicited emails (spams) containing the URL of these compromised websites are sent to the end-users through botnets, often in low levels to escape from getting revealed. This circumvents the traditional Email antivirus gateways which do not identify them as impending threats and they pass on unnoticed to the user. Once the user receives the mail and clicks on the rooted link, a Pandora box of systematic multi-level attacks gets unplugged and the malware gets installed onto the user’s PC by “drive-by download” attack. Bit by bit an appalling drama unfolds as the user’s PC becomes a cog of botnet which is further being deployed to spread spam and blended threats.

Category: computer, Malware, Online Security  | Tags: Blended Threats, botnets, drive-by-download attack, email spams, malicious email attachments, Malware