Malware In May Continues To Increase From April

May 2007 continued to see increasing amounts of malware and viruses from the previous month thus threatening the security of web users worldwide, as per the news published by BCS News on June 21, 2007.

According to security company ScanSafe, web viruses rose to 36% in May from 26% in April. Spyware was 10% in May following an increase from 8% in April.

Dan Nadir, VP, product strategy, ScanSafe commented that May was the second consecutive month with a significant hike in web viruses. He thinks this could by partly due to the ANI (animated cursor) vulnerability discovered in March. Although there was a patch available since early part of April, millions of computers have not patched their systems from the ANI exploits. The company thinks ANI exploits will stay on in the coming months, said Nadir, and Business Wire published it on June 19, 2007.

ScanSafe report particularly stressed about the expanding malware problem. These malware reside on legitimate websites and is due to a third party embedding malicious content into the pages. The content usually are picked from ad servers, widgets and user-contributed material.

There is no single content owner for most websites today. The content for such sites have contributions from a third party in addition to the site owner. The third party contents are often from blogs, advertisements, and other sources, explained Nadir. BCS News published this on June 21, 2007.

Malware writers are beginning to pick up with stupefying techniques that could help them bypass detection by Web filtering programs, which crawl the Web to find malware. Conventional web filtering products that depend on honeypots and URL databases that are periodically updated to recognize threats could expose users to such anti-web crawling attacks, as reported by Business Wire on June 19, 2007.

To cite two instances where malware spread through website content outside the web owner's direct control, hackers in early June accessed passwords for FTP accounts relating to 3,500 websites that DreamHost hosted and in May when a compromised ad server hoped to spread an ANI exploit.

As an example video website YouTube had malware hidden in its films that infected users' machines.

Related article: Malware Authors Turn More Insidious

» SPAMfighter News - 7/5/2007