F-Secure Released its Q2-2009 IT Security Report

F-Secure, an online security firm, have recently released its Q2 2009 IT Security Wrap-Up Report.

In it, the firm praises the US President Barack Obama for the stand he has taken towards cyber security as well as for his knowledge about terms such as 'spoofing' and 'malware.' In fact, the new government in the United States is understood to have established "Cybercom," a novel organization that will coordinate the daily activities of computer networks of the Pentagon and military.

While these efforts are to control the activities of cyber criminals in the United States including spam or malware campaigns, it is left to see whether the Obama administration succeeds in toppling the cyber criminals, the security firm states.

During the first six months of 2009, the Conficker worm was the dominant factor on the threat landscape. F-Secure points out in its report for the second quarter of 2009 that the Conficker virus has turned out as the major malicious program since it has been creating havoc for recent years. Conficker B disseminated its infection worldwide, infecting millions of PCs despite the media publishing news of Conficker C that was expected to hit systems on April 1, 2009 but failed to prove its severity. However, Conficker is still active, F-Secure observes.

The company further indicates via its new IT security report that with social networking steadily growing, there has been a corresponding increase in malware targeting social networking websites. From January 2009 to June 2009, the worm namely "Mikeyy" targeted Twitter for the first time, while malicious websites through search results related to widely accepted news stories were extremely common. F-Secure states that unlike before, social networking websites have been proving as both news makers and news breakers; consequently, they have been the source of rapidly disseminating security problems.

Citing the reason for this, security specialists stated since more and more people are using the social networking websites, hackers and malware distributors are increasingly manipulating the same to disseminate their malicious codes and malware.

Additionally, F-Secure claims that targeted attacks have been popularly relying on PDF files during January-June 2009.

Related article: F-Secure Alerts against Bogus Windows Update Sites

» SPAMfighter News - 7/7/2009