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Trojans Prick PCs As Top Malware Threat
David Utter
Staff Writer
2008-07-31
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An assessment of the leading computer threats through the first half of 2008 found malware riding along in Trojans posing the most problems for people.
 | | Trojans Prick PCs As Top Malware Threat |  |
By the numbers observed by security vendor BitDefender, Trojans proved the odds-on choice by malware distributors around the world.
In their E-Threats Landscape Report, BitDefender claimed 80 percent of the world's malware arrives via a Trojan on someone's machine. Once in place, malware can take many forms, logging keystrokes at financial sites or simply serving as yet another spam relay in a bot network.
"The most difficult task is not the malware's dissemination, but the system's infiltration and exposure to other threats. This explains the Trojan horses' heavy mass production we encountered the last six months." said Sorin Dudea, Head of BitDefender Antimalware Research.
When that malware arrived, it showed a preference for flaws in applications and in operating systems roughly one-third of the time. Malware continues to persist as a profit-motivated endeavor. Criminals want to make money fast, as they always have with bots and keyloggers.
On the spam side, image spam may have run its course. Such spam dropped to a mere 3 percent of spam seen by BitDefender.
The old standby of text-based spam continues to be a pest. It showed up in some 70 percent of total junk email hitting inboxes.
BitDefender also warned security pros on the potential abuse from Flash-based attacks. "The end of May already brought numerous attempts seeking to take advantage of the Exploit.SWF.Gen that led to remote code execution via Web browsers, e-mail clients, as well as other applications on the systems worldwide," said BitDefender's Mircea Mitu.
"We expect to see the figure of Adobe Flash ActiveScript exploitations increasing in the following months." Mitu expects the wide availability of the Flash Player, coupled with the sheer number of sites requiring its use, to be problematic.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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