Sunbelt Declares August 2009 Top Ten Malicious E-threats List

Windows security software provider 'Sunbelt Software' has released its list of Top Ten malicious programs for August 2009.

The company reports that the first malware on the list is Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen, a password-stealing Trojan whose prevalence rose by 53.7% to reach 7.67% of total detections made by Sunbelt in August 2009. However, it accounted for 4.99% of overall detections during July 2009.

During August 2009, Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT that wasn't part of Sunbelt's July malware list made to the second rank with an overall 7.57% of detections. The malware represents a downloader in connection with fake security applications known as 'scareware.' Once downloaded, the scareware performs a false scan for malware on the victim's PC and subsequently display fake alerts that there is an infection on the system. Thereafter, it attempts to persuade the victim to buy another fake security program.

Michael St. Neitzel, Vice-President of Threat Research and Technologies at Sunbelt Software, said - it was hardly surprising that Zbot appeared as the most prevalent malware during July-August 2009. According to the expert, Zbot was an extremely adaptable malware, which inserted malicious script from a website on a remote server for stealing victims' cached passwords or particulars required for logging into banking websites along with data within cookies and certificates. Moreover, the malware was featured with certain backdoor traits and could intercept users' keystrokes, as reported by SourceWire on September 2, 2009.

Additionally, Sunbelt's top ten malware list also includes the AntiVirus-XP 2008 that never appeared in the earlier lists. This malware is a bogus, damaging backdoor Trojan that tries to frighten end-users into buying worthless anti-spyware programs after convincing them that malware has infected their computers.

Surprisingly, Win32.induc, a virus that received hype during August 2009 for disseminating itself via development applications called Delphi, didn't appear on the August list.

According to security experts, trojans continued to be a dangerous threat to the computer security. Recently, BitDefender, another company providing web-security, too indicated that trojans represented a common Internet threat to IT sourcing end-users during August 2009 whose prevalence suggested that Trojan.Clicker.CM contributed 14% of overall infections.

Related article: Sunbelt Software’s Release List of Top Ten Malware for September 2008

» SPAMfighter News - 9/21/2009