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Bitdefender Releases Q3-2010 Security Report, Autorun First Among Five e-Threats

BitDefender the security company published its list of 5 malware threats that were most prevalent during Q3-2010, stating that Trojan.AutorunINF.Gen was first in rank since it generated an estimated 11% of all infections.

Moreover, according to the company, Trojan.AutorunINF.Gen steadily retained its position while it continued to be the most well-known malware month-after-month via its proliferation through Windows shared files and removable devices, without difficulty. Actually, malware writers exploit the Autorun utility in Windows to push dangerous files that are inside contaminated USB drives.

Meanwhile, coming on No.2 is Win32.Worm.Downadup.Gen, that's also called Conficker, and which accounted for 6% of all infections worldwide. This malware too exploits the Autorun utility and shares a place on the malware-dissemination list with Trojan.AutorunINF.Gen.

Worryingly, if Conficker and Autorun are combined, they make up to almost 20% of all infections observed during Q3-2010, just because both exploit the utilization of a common medium of assault.

Besides, as per BitDefender's experts, since Windows XP is widely adopted, it further drives the infection rate of Conficker and Autorun. Indeed, despite Microsoft releasing patches and guidelines for fixing the security flaw that Conficker targets, and the attack medium that Autorun files leverage, there continues to be gaps within patch implementation as well as threat mitigation.

Meanwhile, the third place on BitDefender's list goes to a sample threat that represents the Exploit.PDF-JS.Gen family of exploits. This generic infection handles distorted PDF files to abuse various flaws within the Adobe PDF Reader's JavaScript engine so that it can run more malware on users' systems.

Following Exploit.PDF-JS.Gen, however, are remote-access malicious programs, more familiarly understood as PC Trojans on the 4th and 5th positions. Of these, one on the 4th position is a newcomer, which proliferates on Warez and Torrent websites appearing like a codec, and accounted for 3.13% of all infections. The other one, however, contributed a total 3.18% of all infections.

Eventually BitDefender's specialists state that exercising simple caution along with constantly maintaining the latest software versions, work as the easiest methods for warding off these malware infections, while USB sticks specially, should always be scanned before putting to use.

Related article: BitDefender Releases March malware List

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