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Attackers increasingly are distributing malware that can be used for a variety of different tasks, Kaspersky Lab says.
In a troubling trend for enterprises, an analysis of botnet activity in the first six months of 2018 shows that multifunctional malware tools are becoming increasingly popular among attackers.
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Kaspersky Lab inspected more than 150 malware families and their modifications across some 60,000 botnets around the world and found that the share of multipurpose Remote Access Tools has almost doubled on botnets since the beginning of 2017 – from 6.5% to 12.2%.
The three most widespread of these RATs or backdoors—Njrat, DarkComet, and Nanocore—are all malware tools that attackers can relatively easily modify for different purposes or adapt for distribution in specific regions. Kaspersky Lab discovered Njrat to have command and control centers in 99 countries, mainly because of how easily attackers can use it to configure a personal backdoor with very little knowledge of malware development. Nanocore and DarkComet have C2 centers in over 80 countries for the same reason.
Similarly, Trojans capable of being modified and controlled by different command and control servers and used for different purposes were another category of malware that grew in Q1, though not quite as dramatically as RATs. Kaspersky Lab’s analysis showed that the share of such Trojans increased from 32.9% in the second half of 2017 to around 34.3% in the first six months of 2018.
Over the same period, the proportion of single-purpose tools being distributed through botnets declined substantially. For example, the share of special-purpose banking Trojans distributed via botnets dropped over 9.2%, from around 22.5% in the second half of 2017 to 13.3% of all malicious files in the first half of 2018.
Read more: Dark Reading
