Kaspersky Malware Says Microsoft Office African Users Witness Increased Attacks

A report by Russia-based internet cybersecurity firm Kaspersky has revealed that in Q2 2022, the number of exploits for vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Office suite increased globally compared to Q1 2022.

These fresh exploits account for 82% of the total number of exploits across different platforms.

This is according to the latest quarterly malware report from Kaspersky.

While highlighting the regions to be worst hit by the increased attacks via MS office vulnerabilities, the META regions (Middle East, Turkey and Africa) were noted to have the worst attacks.

The report also identified the MS Office vulnerabilities as CVE-2021-40444, CVE-2017-0199, CVE-2017-11882 and CVE-2018-0802 which were mostly used by criminals during the second quarter.

More than 551,000 users were said to fall victim to these attacks.

As confirmed by Kaspersky’s solutions, if the attackers had succeeded, it is possible direct access to the victim’s computers would have been successful. This would have granted the hackers access to view, change, or delete data without the users’ knowledge through remote execution of malicious code.

In Africa alone, there has been an upward trend of attacks in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa.

Kenya witnessed an increase of 20% in the number of users attacked through these vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Office suite over the last quarter.

Nigerian users witnessed a 9% increase in the number of attacked users while In South Africa, the number of users attacked through these vulnerabilities decreased by 3% in Q2 compared to Q1.

Globally, the upward trend in the number of such attacks has made security operation centres stay alert.to cordon such occurrences from spreading.