September was a good month for ransomware, but not so good for its victims. The malicious code kept spreading last month, and has now moved into a top three position in Check Point’s index of the most prevalent malware. Locky, one of the more popular variants of the malware, is now accounting for six per cent of all ransomware attacks that happened in September. Total number of attacks, globally, jumped 13 per cent. Three new malware variants, Chanitor (downloader), Blackhole (exploit kit) and Nivdort (multipurpose bot) have made it into the top ten list. HummingBad, for the sixth consecutive month, is the most common mobile malware.

Conficker has accounted for 14 per cent of all recognised attacks, followed by Sality (six per cent) and Locky (six per cent). The top ten families account for half of all recognised attacks.

“The continued growth in ransomware is a symptom of the number of businesses simply paying ransoms to release critical data, making it a lucrative and attractive attack vector for cybercriminals,” said Nathan Shuchami, Head of Threat Prevention at Check Point.

“To remedy this, organisations need advanced threat prevention measures on networks, endpoints and mobile devices to stop malware at the pre-infection stage, such as Check Point’s SandBlast Zero-Day Protection and Mobile Threat Prevention solutions, to ensure that they are adequately secured against the latest threats.”

Check Point’s Threat Prevention Resources are available on this link.

Image source: Shutterstock/Carlos Amarillo