Trojans to be More Threatening Than Viruses

After an elaborate assessment of a number of malicious cyber threats in 2007, Kaspersky Labs has prepared its report entitled, "Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2007: Malware evolutions in 2007." The report mainly shows that the threat from viruses is no longer as big as before but has fallen in rank down the malware chart.

Kaspersky Labs reveals that viruses are now third in its list of five threats. But, this ranking does not imply that they have reduced in number, as there have been no other types of more common threats.

Information-stealing Trojans, which were found to be at fifth place in the threat list targeted users of social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Blogger etc. These have been found to be highly effective mediums for spreading viruses and other malware as users willingly allow files to run locally from their server. The common fear is that the hidden Trojan would be joined to files saved on the computer or sent to others.

But, Kaspersky warns that there would be a substantial rise in trojans during 2008 declaring that its primary developers would be Chinese cyber criminals who would use the malware to target players of Internet games. According to the company, these game and banking trojans are considered to be the main carriers of the greatest and latest malware.

The second malware, which has been observed to be a bigger threat than plain viruses, is the 'rootkit'. A rootkit embeds itself when the operating system is launched. A variation of rootkit is called the 'bootkit,' which becomes active the moment a system is started.

Another major cyber threat is 'Malware 2.0' indicating that malware developers have navigated to their next generation of items, according to Kaspersky. This type of malware is also becoming more and more astute in identifying efforts to destroy it. Therefore, virus authors have been compelled to design new ways with which they can protect themselves.

According to Kaspersky, the well known, Storm worm, has been one most successful malware to work out this approach. It demonstrated how this variety of malwares' spreading methods and their behavior types during 2007 gave anti-virus specialists another headache.

Related article: Trojans to Target VoIP in 2006

» SPAMfighter News - 3/17/2008