50% of Global Computers Contaminated, Mostly With Trojans During 2011

According to Panda Security the international IT vendor, half of the total PCs examined worldwide during January 2011 had some infection or another owing to malicious programs. The company, which published certain statistics, reports that PC Trojans were responsible for the maximum number of incidences (59%), with conventional PC viruses (12%) and PC worms (9%), trailing behind.

Other malicious e-threats that Panda Security identified during January 2011 included adware (7.94%), hacking tools (4.03%) and backdoor Trojans (2.35%).

Moreover, on Panda's list of Top Ten security threats, Generic Trojans reportedly occupied the first position at 19.08%, while other e-threats on it were Trj/CI.A (13.47%), Generic malware (7.28%), Trj/Downloader.MDW (2.73%), W32/Xor-encoded.A (1.86%), Exploit/ByteVerify (1.59%), Trj/Pupack.A (0.86%) and Adware/Zwangi (0.84%).

Interestingly, the PC-Trojan, Lineage persisted as it kept on proliferating and infecting computers, suggesting that fundamental anti-virus safeguards were lacking for even malware programs that were greatly ancient.

Remarking about the report's discoveries, Technical Director Luis Corrons of PandaLabs stated that his company didn't witness several considerable changes in global infections between December 2010 and January 2011 thereby demonstrating the true picture vis-à-vis the existing scenario. Prnewswire.com published this on February 9, 2011.

Furthermore, Panda Security highlights that while USA occupied a position on the company's Top 10 List, countries like Thailand, China, Taiwan, Russia and Turkey made it to the first 5 rankings for the greatest number of infections, accounting for 60-67% of the incidences. USA, which accounted for 43% of all infections, was down at No.10, marginally trailing behind Brazil and Poland, countries historically known for being malware havens.

In addition, other countries, which occupied a place on the List, are Argentina, Costa Rica, Spain, France, Hungary, Slovakia, Belgium, Italy and Japan, Panda Security indicates.

Stated Head of Sub-Saharan Operations Jeremy Matthews for Panda Security while remarking about the report, even though South Africa didn't come on the top ten list vis-à-vis infections, a constant rise was being observed with respect to the total number of e-threats targeted at African users. The threats mostly occurred as financial scams against inexperienced or novice Internet users, Matthews added that Mybroadband.co.za published on February 9, 2011.

Related article: “Loopholes did not cause online banking thefts”: ICBC

» SPAMfighter News - 2/16/2011