Online Scanner Shows Results of July Top Twenty

After a brief interval, Trojan dialers are back to the rankings in July 2007, according to results from online scanning operations.

When Dialer.qn rose in June 2007, predictions said the program would launch a new onslaught. So the Dialer.cj occupied the first place in the malware charts with a relatively significant 9%. This Trojan, which had occupied the first position in December 2006, is a completely new entrant in the listings. Now after a gap of seven months it has reappeared in July.

In the overall rankings of July 2007 Top Twenty malwares that contained two Trojan dialers among the first three programs there were several backdoor trojans as well. These are designed to remotely control a targeted system through IRC channels. The backdoors were IRCBot.acd (second place, Zapchast (fifth place), mIRC-based (seventh place) and Cloner.ae (thirteenth place). All these trojans had pushed the adware programs to lower rankings. In May-June 2007 these adwares had consistently improved their rankings largely because of the significant rise of the adware variant Virtumonde. But Virtumonde.jp, the leader in June 2007 could not cope with the onslaught of trojans in July 2007 so it fell by 10 places.

However, the adware programs would not accept defeat so easily. The Trojan-Downloader.Win32.LoadAV.gen, which had dropped down three positions from third to the sixth, relatively picked up in percentage terms. It comprised of 1.68% of all malware spotted in July 2007 as against 2.14% in June the same year. This Trojan is designed to download and install various adwares onto an affected system thereby increasing its continuity.

A relatively significant number of 11 malicious programs joined as newcomers in the Top Twenty. As usual, nearly half of them were new variants of Trojan Downloader. Trojan.Alphabet.gen and Downloader.Win32.Nurech, the botnet creators were particularly threatening.

Veteran viruses, Email-Worm.Win32.Rays and Virus.VBS.Small.a came back in the charts. Rays, which had exited from the Top Twenty of June 2007, managed to come back in July 2007 taking the bottom place. The virus' 'twin brother', the Brontok worm fell by seven places in the months of June-July 2007. Kaspersky reported this on August 1, 2007.

Related article: Online Card Fraud Shows Greater Tendency Than Chip and Pin

» SPAMfighter News - 8/17/2007