Kaspersky Lab worries about rising number of encoder attacks

MOSCOW, Jul 19 (PRIME) -- Russian antivirus software maker Kaspersky Lab is worried by an increase in attacks of viruses-encoders on the world industrial infrastructure, the company said on Wednesday in a statement.

“The most important thing that raises concerns in the increase of encoder attacks is that they’re aimed more often at financial and industrial infrastructure. The reason behind the trend is evident: criminals see targeted malware attacks on organizations as more profitable than massive attacks on ordinary users,” Kaspersky Lab’s antivirus expert Anton Ivanov said.

“In this case, perpetrators want to get not only money of companies, but also valuable information that can be used for blackmail or sabotage.”

The worries are confirmed by recent outbreaks of attacks of ransomware WannaCry in May and ExPetr in June, which infected thousands of computers of commercial companies and state entities all over the world, he said.

The number of victims of file-encoding Trojans soared to 1.152 million in 2016–2017 from 718,536 in 2015–2016. The number of victims of ransomware rose to 2.316 million from 2.581 million.

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