Malware Dominated Threat Landscape in Malaysia in 2H-09

According to the eighth edition of Microsoft's Security Intelligence Report (SIRv8) for 2H 2009, threats disinfected in most of the Malaysian PCs were malware.

The report says that the firm (Microsoft) identified malware on 4.0 PCs out of every 1,000 PCs scanned during 2H 2009 in Malaysia, representing a decline from the level of 5.1 in 1H 2009.

The most prevalent category of malware in Malaysia during the period was computer worms, accounting for 27.8% of all compromised PCs, down from 28.1% in 1H 2009.

Miscellaneous Trojans, including all those families of trojans that are not categorized as backdoors or droppers/downloaders, constituted the second most widespread malware category in Malaysia. This malware category accounted for 16.6% of all infected PCs in the country, a decline from 17% in 1H 2009. Surprisingly, there was considerably lower prevalence of Trojan Downloaders/Droppers in Malaysia than several other regions and countries across the world, at 10.9%, marginally up from 10.4% in 1H 2009.

Misc. potentially unwanted software constituted the third most common malware category by infecting 17,837 PCs in the second half of 2009. Two other important categories include Adware and Trojan Downloaders/Droppers which compromised overall 15,112 and 13,989 PCs respectively during the same period, according to the data compiled by Microsoft's report.

Apart from these, Backdoors (9,815), Password Stealers & Monitoring Tools (8,087), PC viruses (3,394), Spyware (2,887) and malicious exploits (691) were the other malware categories which were commonly found in Malaysia by Microsoft in 2H 2009.

Jacqueline Peterson-Jarvis, Security and Privacy Head, Microsoft Asia-Pacific, stated that SIRv8 gives strong proofs that cybercriminals are growing increasingly sophisticated and bundling cyber threats to develop, update and execute exploit kits that are sold to others to be deployed, as per the news published by bernama.com on June 10, 2010.

Lt-Col (Rtd) Husin Jazri, CEO, CyberSecurity Malaysia, also highlighted the need to intensify the awareness level related to the safety issues in cyberspace among the netizens in Malaysia, reported bernama.com on June 10, 2010.

Related article: Malware Authors Turn More Insidious

» SPAMfighter News - 6/21/2010