April Malware List Has New Detections

April 2007 again demonstrated waves of virulent threats on the Internet, warned Security Company ESET.

The statistics from Internet virus analysts ESET revealed that a fresh variety of security threats occupied the top five positions of all security malware detected during the month. This composition contributed 14% of all undesirable activities.

The Ani.Gen Trojan that got significant publicity took the first place. The Trojan exploits the manner in which Windows uses animated cursor (.ani) document. Ani.Gen accounted for nearly 5% of total detections in April. Malware authors exploited this vulnerability to the maximum in Microsoft's operating system.

Even the more sophisticated users are vulnerable to the Ani.Gen attacks finding their computers compromised, said Randy Abrams, director of education for ESET. Itnews published Abram's comments on May 15, 2007.

There can be some protection from Ani.Gen for virtualization technologies like SandboxIE used for web browsing but e-mail continues to be a popular attack medium. Further these types of attacks will always compromise Outlook even in plain text, according to Abrams. BCS.org published this as news on May 14, 2007.

The PSW.Agent.NCC Trojan that accounted for 2.85% of all malware threats in April retreated from position one in April to position two in May. This Trojan belongs to a family that uses keylogging techniques to steal passwords. Win32/Pacex.Gen was at the third place. It is a mass-mailing worm that spreads remarkably fast. It was first detected in March 2007.

Agent.AWF, a botnet downloader occupied the fourth place on April malware charts. The virus downloads additional malware from websites to build botnets. Botnets push out spam mails to bombard servers and cause distributed denial-of-service. Win32/Perlovga was in the fifth place being the next most prolific Trojan malware. It climbed up from the seventh spot in April. The Perlovga infects through e-mail, FTP or P2P programs. Criminals use it to gather sensitive information from affected computers.

According to another new report by PC Tools, many malware developers were employing advanced rootkit technologies and trojans to evade modern Internet security products. Software giant Microsoft released 29 patches for that many security flaws in its Windows operating system.

Related article: April 2007 Saw a Two-fold Jump in phishing Sites

» SPAMfighter News - 5/19/2007