Malware Assaults on the Rise, Says Microsoft

In its Security Intelligence Report that Microsoft published on May 12, 2011, the software company released statistics on different malware groups along with their infections during 2010 both on the basis of three months and six months, reported Eweek.com dated May 12, 2011.

Says Microsoft, 7 malware groups occur frequently for the network environments of both corporate and individual users, albeit their order and proportions are different. Win32/Conficker, a kind of PC-worm that proliferates variously typically runs well in a corporate network environment compared to the Net that's publicly shared. The malware ranks first among the series of top domains, maintaining considerable margin; however, occupies the 9th spot among the series of non-domains, states Microsoft.

Evidently, it's been many years that malware specially designed for Java has been into existence, nevertheless, cyber-criminals hadn't concentrated enough on abusing security flaws in Java till as of recent period. Reportedly, during Q3-2010, Java assaults rose to about 14 times the attacks identified during Q2-2010 whence two vulnerabilities within Sun (presently called Oracle) JVM namely CVE-2009-3867 and CVE-2008-5353 were exploited. Together the flaws made it up to an 85% share of total Java exploits spotted during H2-2010, the report states.

Furthermore, malware Pornpop made its debut during Q4-2010 whence it's been spreading pretty fast. Also, though it's some time that ClickPotato has been into existence, the threat from it isn't too great. But during H2-2010, both these malware were the most-prevalent being responsible for almost 25% of all contaminations.

There's also a significant mention of scareware in the report implying fake security software that's used as a highly frequent means for defrauding victims off their money. Nonetheless, the scareware which was most frequently spotted till the 3rd quarter of 2010 was FakeSpypro that eventually disappeared during Q3-2010. Following this, another scareware namely FakePAV appeared that became the Q4's most frequently spotted rogue anti-virus.

Remarking about the above report, Principal Analyst Graham Titterington at Ovum stated that as more-and-more end-users and tools emerged on the Internet daily, there'd been more doors opened for cyber-criminals now than ever-earlier for ensnaring end-users with attacks, published Infosecurity.com dated May 12, 2011.

Related article: Malware Authors Turn More Insidious

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