Banking trojans were on the march for the second summer running

August saw a significant increase in cyber attacks involving the Ramnit banking trojan.

Ramnit has doubled its global impact in recent months after a large scale campaign that has been converting victim’s machines into malicious proxy servers.

This significant push has elevated the banking trojan to sixth place in the monthly Threat Index, which ranks the ten most widespread threats of the month.

Monero cryptominer Coinhive remained the most prolific malware of the month for August, impacting 17 per cent of organisations worldwide.

It activates when a user visits a web page and hogs a great deal of the computational resources of the end users’ machines to mine coins without the user’s knowledge, potentially crashing the system.

Dorkbot and Andromeda ranked second and third respectively, each with a global impact of six per cent.

This is the second summer running criminals have upped their use of banking trojans to target victims and make a quick profit, noted Maya Horowitz, threat intelligence group manager at Check Point, which publishes the information.

“Trends like this should not be ignored as hackers are acutely aware of which attack vectors are most likely to be successful at any given time, suggesting internet users’ browsing habits during the summer months make them more susceptible to banking trojans,” she said.

“In order to prevent exploitation by banking trojans and other types of attacks, it is critical that enterprises employ a multi-layered cybersecurity strategy that protects against both established malware families cyber attacks and brand new threats.”