Spam Up -- But Not Alone

During the second quarter of 2007, spam accounted for more than 90 percent of corporate mail received, according to TrustLayer Mail, a managed security service of Panda Software.

At the same time, Trojans and adware accounted for 49.6 percent of infections detected by Panda ActiveScan in June. Trojans, which increased by 0.75 percent in June, causing 26.89 percent of infections, whereas adware was responsible for 22.72 percent. These figures prove that most new malicious code is mainly created to fraudulently obtain financial benefit. With respect to the threats distributed using e-mail, the most frequently detected has been the Netsky.P worm.

Other types of threats move along the same parameters as in May, with worms taking third place in the ranking (8.71 percent) followed by backdoor Trojans (3.87 percent), dialers (3.34percent) and spyware (2.99 percent). Bots appear at the end of the list with 2.58 percent of infections.

"Things have not changed much in June," explains Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs. "Figures obtained show once more that cyber-criminals are after financial returns. The fact that Trojans and adware were the culprits in almost half of all infections show that cyber-crooks are mainly interested in online fraud."

In terms of the ranking of June’s 10 most virulent malicious codes, Downloader.MDW is the leader. This Trojan is designed to download other malware onto computers. In second place comes the familiar Brontok.H worm. After this comes Sdbot.ftp, the script used by this family of worms to download themselves via FTP.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:02 AM  Permalink