Increase in Halloween malware attacks

There’s an increase in the number of Trojans circulating in the pre-Halloween period this year, according to GFI Software. Eight of the top 10 threat detections currently spreading on the internet are Trojans, up from six during October last year.

Furthermore, three of the top 10 threat detections from last year’s Halloween season are still on the list, highlighting the lasting impact of this type of malware long after the holiday is over.

Consumers should be on the lookout for new iterations of the following common types of attack:

• Halloween Tweets, “likes” and posts on various social media sites that can be used to lure users to malicious websites.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning, in which links to malicious Web sites show up in search engine results for holiday items.
• Halloween-themed attachments posing as invitations, greeting cards or documents. Clicking on these creates a significant risk of downloading rogue security products or other malware.
• “Typo attacks” which take advantage of the increased Holiday traffic to commonly misspelled URLs. Malware writers set up spoofed infected sites and download locations to trap unsuspecting web users who misspell URLs and end up in the wrong place.
• Sites that offer contests attempting to get visitors to subscribe to questionable subscription services that are billed to their cell phone monthly.