Scammers galore: Number of malicious web ads hosted in Singapore surged by 827% in Q2

Discover the country’s most dangerous malware.

More and more Singaporeans are becoming justifiably paranoid over their online safety, following a spate of cyber attacks in recent months. But a chilling statistic shows that the country remains painfully vulnerable to online scams.

According to Trend Micro’s Q2 Security Round-up, there was an 837% spike in the number of malicious URLs hosted in Singapore from April to June this year, while there was an increase of around 128% in the number of malicious URLs clicked by Singaporean users.

“This shows that Singaporeans are still pretty vulnerable to online scams which may compromise important and sensitive information,” noted the report.

The country’s top malware are CRCK_KEYGEN, HKTL_KEYGEN, CRCK_ACTIVATOR, WORM_DOWNAD.AD and CRCK_PATCH

Here’s more from the report:
There has been a 3% decrease in online banking malware detections in Q2 compared to Q1.

The World Cup became a topic of interest in Singapore. During the quarter, TrendLabs noted and reported several scams, phishing sites, malicious apps, and threats that took advantage of the event for social engineering.

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) disrupted the operations of the Gameover botnet which potentially stalled cybercrime operations. This caused a significant drop in the number of victims of online banking malware. As the FBI was able to disclose those that were affected to partner organizations, the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore was able to report2,000 confirmed cases of Gameover and CryptoLocker infections.