A new report by Trustwave sheds light on how cybercriminals continue to shift tactics to increase the success rate of their attacks. When it comes to spam, the report shows that campaigns aiming to distribute malware are on the decline, while other malicious spam campaigns, such as those involving sextortion emails, are becoming increasingly common.
Threat actors also continue to make changes to malware so that it becomes more difficult for security solutions to detect malicious code. In 2018, 2 out of three (67%) malware samples relied on obfuscation techniques to stay undetected, a dramatic increase from last year’s report when the number was 30%. Downloaders accounted for 13% of malware in 2018, making them the most popular category, just like in 2017. Other common types of malware were remote access Trojans (10%) and web shells (8%).
Read more: Cybercriminals are becoming more methodical and adaptive
