Malicious Programs Kept On Increasing During Q4-2010, Reports McAfee

In its recently-published "McAfee Threats Report: Fourth Quarter 2010," McAfee Inc. discloses that there has been a continuous rise in malware, while 20m fresh malware items were uncovered during 2010, corresponding to almost 55,000 fresh malware daily. Also from a total of 55m malicious programs that McAfee has hitherto detected, 36% were written during 2010 alone.

Remarking about these discoveries, Senior Vice-President Vincent Weafer of McAfee stated that the company's Q4-2010 Threat Report indicated that online crooks were keeping themselves updated with everything popular as also whatever would make the greatest influence with the least initiative. McAfee.com published this on February 8, 2011.

Weafer further said that over the recent quarters, the pattern of malicious software had been quite the same across geographies; however, during Q4-2010, the company observed an enormous change regionally, suggesting that cyber-crooks were keeping tabs on the trends across the globe. Moreover, McAfee Labs observed that device popularity was positively correlated with cyber-crime operations, a tendency that McAfee anticipated to increase during 2011, he added.

And while malicious programs surged, spam volumes dipped to its nadir within many years, accounting for 80% of all electronic mails during Q4-2010 that was the lowest ever-since Q1-2007.

Says Principal Engineer Adam Wosotowsky at McAfee, this huge dip is because of a transition time descriptive of the quiet prior to a storm, since many botnets became inactive over the vacation time, a period normally marked with an upward climb of spam levels. Crn.com published this on February 9, 2010.

In addition, McAfee discovered that with the rise in the usage of various gadgets, which are used to access the Net say Internet TV gadgets, smart-phones and tablets, there had been increasing numbers of Web-based malware attacks, while such attacks are likely to go on increasing in sophistication and scale under the condition. malware such as Koobface, Conficker and Zeus-Murofet increased drastically during Q4-2010, McAfee observes.

Besides, the report reveals that similar to a flu epidemic, contaminations from botnets steeped most during Q4-2010, when Cutwail, Rustock and Bobax acted as the major botnets, while social-networking websites similar to mosquitoes, frequently behaved like disease carriers.

Related article: Malicious Scripts with Zero-byte Padding can Pass Undetected

» SPAMfighter News - 2/17/2011