Malware Infection Displays a Rising Trend

According to security experts, Malaysia is experiencing an increasing rate of malware infection, with reports of over 160,000 instances since the start of 2009.

Lt. Col. Husin bin Jazri (Retd.), Chief Executive Officer of CyberSecurity Malaysia, states that the purpose of malicious code or malware is to penetrate computers and damage them without any knowledge or consent of the systems' owners. According to him, malware means worms, viruses, crimeware, bots, spyware, rootkits, Trojan horses and various other unwanted programs created to attack computers, as reported by Mis-Asia on December 1, 2009.

Husin further states that as the global inter-connectivity improves, malware poses as the most severe threat to Internet users in the modern time.

During the initial ten months of 2009, there was an increase of 87% in the incidences of cyber attacks compared to nearly 3,000 during 2008.

Of these estimates, 225 cases or 7.6% of total malware infections have been reported. Nevertheless, the actual number of PCs, after analyzing their IP addresses, does not get reflected via these small proportions of malware infections. During October 2009, there were over 87,000 distinct Internet Protocol addresses contaminated by malicious code.

In addition, MyCERT has further informed that 168,156 instances of malware contamination based on distinct IP addresses happened during January-October 2009.

According to the experts, there is a continuous growth in cyber threats all over the world while the global response center of IMPACT (International Multilateral Partnership against Cyber Threats) has disclosed that bot infections on over 14 Million PCs from the entire globe occurred during a single week in November 2009. Incidentally, bot means software, which performs activities in an automatic fashion to fulfill malicious objectives on the Net.

Eventually, Husin said that considering Malaysians were no more unfamiliar with the online world, it was now urgently required that netizens complied with their basic privilege to access the Internet through awareness of cyber threats as well as via the knowledge of how they could avoid falling prey to cyber crime.

Related article: Malware Authors Turn More Insidious

» SPAMfighter News - 12/15/2009