Actu
F-Secure Monthly Threat Update: Crypto spam surge & MS Office Vulnerability
October 2021 by F-Secure
F-Secure has released its threat highlights report for September 2021 which identifies a surge in crypto-related spam email and warns of the persisting prevalence of an exploit that targets MS Office products.
The shift in cryptocurrency market trends has brought more spam email related to the theme, meaning it was the most popular subject for spam followed by e-Commerce and financial spam. In September, hacking tools, exploits and ransomware were the top malware types. In general, the volumes slightly dropped from August. Archive files are the most prevalent attachments in malicious emails. These archives contain other filetypes such as executables and document files. The other most prevalent types of attachments are Office documents which contain MS Office exploits or malicious macros.
CVE-2017-11882 remains the most common exploit used in the wild, as detected by the F-Secure endpoint protection. The exploit is most commonly detected in files such as.xlsx, .eml and .doc files. It targets vulnerabilities in MS Office products and allows the attacker to carry out remote code execution. CVE-2021-26411, a critical memory corruption vulnerability in Internet Explorer, has also gained significant popularity in September. This vulnerability can be exploited via malicious websites and has now been patched by Microsoft.
