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Cape Town - The first three months of 2015 has confirmed that cyber criminals are determined to steal cash with sophisticated tools capable of multiple threats.
Anti-virus software company Kaspersky Lab has said that internet security is always a catch-up game with criminals constantly evolving strategy.
"This is how the cyber world works: We are hunting the hunters, who constantly upgrade the tools they use to trick us, but we learn, too," said Aleks Gostev, chief security expert in the Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) and Kaspersky Lab.
The company confirmed the existence of the Equation Group, labelled as a sophisticated cyber threat and linked to terror malwares Stuxnet and Flame.
"During many years of analysing malware code we also have seen different levels of malicious skills - from the standard 'pack' of back doors and the exploitation of known vulnerabilities to complex cyber espionage platforms, or even tools as powerful as those used by the Equation Group," said Gostev.
Bank attacks
The new malware is capable of infecting hard drive firmware which means it may render traditional defence mechanisms obsolete. Even reformatting the drive cannot disable the malware.
Banks have also come under attack in the period under review with the Carbanak malware which stole up to $1bn directly from financial institutions.
South Africa was largely spared from the attacks which targeted banks in Russia, the US, Germany, China, Ukraine, Canada, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Romania, France, Spain, Norway, India, the UK, Poland, Pakistan, Nepal, Morocco, Iceland, Ireland, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Brazil, Bulgaria and Australia.
Cyber thieves have long shifted their focus to targeting money.
In 2014, the Luuuk cyber fraud campaign targeted clients of European banks, netting over €500 000 in just one week - and from one bank.
Even ATMs were targeted with the Tyupkin malware which allowed criminals to make withdrawals without a card.
"Criminals now attack the banks directly because that's where the money is. And they use APT [advanced persistent techniques] techniques for these complex attacks," GReAT director Aleks Gostev said at the time.
Kaspersky said that the number of malicious attacks (2.2 billion) doubled in the first three months of 2015, compared to the same period last year. Online attacks also increased by a third to 469 million with the majority of web resources located in Russia (40%) and the US (39%).
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