One of our goals is sharing with the security community as much as we learn from VirusTotal’s data to help stop, monitor and mitigate malicious activity. When looking back to 2022 we observe different interesting trends; we decided to go deeper into the three most interesting ones: evolution of distribution vectors, trending malware artifacts and toolsets, and threat landscape evolution.
Distribution vector evolution
During 2022 we detected changes in the way malware is distributed. First, the number of URLs used in phishing attacks has doubled since 2021, and the number of emails distributing any kind of malware increased from 11.4% in 2021 to 26.5% in 2022, that is a 132% increase.
This seems to correlate with the huge increase (almost doubled compared to 2021) of malicious PDF files hosted in phishing URLs. Probably this combination was one of the main distribution vectors of fraudulent content in 2022.
At the same time, the number of emails attaching malware files increased, mostly due to spam campaigns distributing common malware (like lovgate and noon). We observed a high peak of formbook and AgentTesla samples in January 2022:
Additionally, the adoption of exploits keeps its growing
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