McAfee Discovers Rise in Malware During Q1-2011

McAfee the security company, which declared its "Threats Report: First Quarter 2011" during the 1st-week of June 2011, stated that 6m distinct malware items were detected during Q1 2011 (January-March, 2011) marking the period as an extremely active 1st quarter down the history of malicious software.

The report then disclosed trends of malware, which considerably influenced the threat scenario like the Rustock botnet's dismantling that used to distribute the largest amount of e-mail junk.

Stated Senior Vice President Vincent Weafer of McAfee Labs, the First Quarter 2011 Threats Report showed that the beginning of 2011 was pretty busy for cyber-criminals. Despite the period depicting a slow down in spam, cyber-criminals didn't necessarily stay quiet, rather they actively chased other possibilities. There were plentiful emerging threats like fresh botnets making efforts for picking up from where Rustock withdrew, added Weafer. Businesswire.com published this on June 1, 2011.

Moreover, according to the McAfee report, there seems to be an increase in scareware scams i.e. fake AV applications while password-capturing Trojans are showing activity on a uniform scale. Simultaneously, Koobface and AutoRun malware, although continue to be widespread globally, appear being within a holding fashion, the security company discloses in its report.

In addition, McAfee observes that there had been steady search-keyword exploitation all through Q1 2011, with a little less than 50% of the everyday search-keywords generating hits among the first hundred returns that link up with malware websites.

Furthermore, according to the report, the security company yet re-discovered that cyber-criminals, scammers and malware authors kept on capitalizing on everyday events, sports, news and famous personalities using them as lure within their campaigns.

To cite one example, the report refers to just a 2-hour interval following the Japanese tsunami and earthquake when McAfee identified the 1st possible fake donation website. Over the subsequent hours, the company gathered over 500 URLs or hostile domains wherein the phrases -Japan, earthquake, or tsunami -were inscribed within their captions.

Finally the report states that during Q1 2011, online miscreants kept on following malware writers' trend of excessively abusing bugs within both Adobe's PDF and Flash software.

Related article: McAfee Alerts Windows about Accessibility Hole in Vista

» SPAMfighter News - 6/9/2011