ScanSafe has announced that one out of every four security threats targeting its customers last week had the goal of financial data theft, including a 410 per cent increase in information theft attacks over the 48 hours prior to the Easter weekend.

With attackers apparently hoping users would let their guards down leading up to the holiday weekend, these attacks consisted of a bizarre mix of new threats combined with older malware resurgence. These incidents involved key logging, screen captures and site monitoring, underscoring a growing trend of increasing intelligence in malware that result in new traffic patterns for security.

The latent level of malware targeting financial information has been gradually increasing over the last two months. However, the week leading up to the Easter holiday saw the highest rise ever seen. This is unusual, not just because of the increase, but rather due to what caused the increase. Traditionally, surges of activity are based on one threatsuch as a worm or virusduring a major outbreak this rise is quite different, and has come about in two ways: 45 per cent are large resurgences of old malware (e.g. Trojan-Spy.Win32.Agent.eo, a form of malware originally discovered in June 2005), the other 55 per cent are rapidly emerging threats that had a big impact, but only for a few days (e.g. Trojan-Spy.HTML.Bankfraud.ot).

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