Successful distributors can make an average of $130 a day so it’s no wonder that the threat space has moved to infections involving the installation of Fake AVs. Stealthily installing a Fake AV on an unsuspecting user’s machine has become a highly lucrative “business”, and hackers are using every tool at their disposal to avoid detection in order to maximize profits. The last few years have seen a proliferation of Fake Antivirus scams. This can be seen most recently in the spread and evolution of Backdoor.Tidserv and W32. With profit as an incentive, more and more hackers are willing to push the difficult boundaries of rootkit development and deployment. Another major change in the threat space is the increased use of advanced rootkit techniques. Fake AVs are also being rapidly rebranded with minor cosmetic changes in order to avoid recognition. Hackers are generating these variants in high volume by taking pre-existing threats and packing or encrypting them by using packer kits and custom encryptors, sometimes as often as on a per-download basis. Last year alone, Symantec identified 240 million new threat variants but less than 200 actual new threat families. In fact it is not unusual today for most victims to get an infection that is unique to their machine.
Today, hackers have moved to a micro-distribution model where millions of variants are created and distributed far and wide to very small numbers of victims. A couple of years ago, the norm was to see relatively few threat variants distributed to millions of users. A new micro distribution model for malicious threats.The threat landscape has radically changed over the last few years and that has driven the need for new approaches to protection. I thought I would share with you some of the background on why we developed this new engine. It combines aggressive heuristics and advanced removal capabilities to combat the newest and toughest threats. Symantec Maximum Repair (SMR) is a brand new security engine that drives our new Norton Power Eraser recovery tool.
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