Research Reveals LockBit Ransomware Surges While Android Droppers Emerge as Top Business Threat

Malwarebytes, a global leader in real-time cyber protection, announced the release of its annual cybersecurity trend and threat intelligence report: 2023 State of Malware. The report shares key cybersecurity developments of 2022 and explains why organizations that protect against the five most dangerous cyberthreat archetypes today will be better secured this year.

“In today’s rapid fire threat landscape, under-resourced organizations often struggle with where to focus their time, attention, and resources,” said Mark Stockley, Cybersecurity Evangelist, Malwarebytes. “This report acts as a guide to those organizations by focusing their limited time on a small number of critical threats across Windows, Mac, and Android. If organizations can understand what it takes to prevent these threats, they are well placed to stop a huge number of other attacks as well.”

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Key findings from the report include:

• LockBit: The Most Dominant Ransomware – LockBit rose to dominance in 2022 and accounted for about one-third of all known ransomware as-a-service (RaaS) attacks, more than three times as many known attacks as the next most active ransomware, ALPHV.
• SocGholish: Simple but Effective – Using websites to spread, rather than attachments, software vulnerabilities, or brute force attacks, the threat comes disguised as a critical browser update. Malwarebytes found that SocGholish performs eligibility checks to ensure it is only triggered by legitimate targets and using lures and malware meant to attract individual targets.
• Android Droppers: Businesses’ Biggest Threat – Droppers, trojan horses that disguise themselves as innocent apps, can be used to deliver pernicious threats like HiddenAds that bombard users with aggressive ads, banking trojans like ShareBot, and spy malware to harvest passwords, geo location, record audio, and even take pictures. In 2022, droppers accounted for 14% of detections on Android.
• Genio: The Mac Menace – Malwarebytes tracks tens of millions of detection events for Mac adware and potentially unwanted programs (PUPs), but the worst is OSX.Genio. In 2022, it was the second most common detection on Macs, appearing on 10 percent of all machines that triggered a detection event.

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