Spam, Trojans & Adware – All Increasing

The government of United States has assured it would hunt down the distributors of junk e-mail. At the Federal Trade Commission Spam Summit in June 2007, J. Keith Mularski, a special agent of FBI, said that the bureau had 70 spam-related cases under active investigation. Informationweek.com published this on July 13, 2007.

Meanwhile, in Q2 2007, 90% of inbound corporate e-mail was spam, according to Panda Software's managed security service, TrustLayer Mail.

PandaLabs also detected trojans and adware in June 2007 that were responsible for 49.6% of infections. The increase in trojans by 0.75% in June helped in creating 26.89% of infections, while adware caused 22.72%.

These statistics are evidence of malicious code being designed with the prime objective to fraudulently acquire monetary gain. Netsky.P has been the most commonly detected worm that distributed threats via e-mail.

Other classes of malware threats followed a trend similar to that of May 2007. Worms with 8.71% took the third place in the series. Backdoor trojans followed with 3.87%, dialers with 3.34%, and spyware with 2.99%. Bots were at the bottom of the list causing 2.58% of all infections.

The scenario in June remained more or less consistent, said Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs. He explained the accumulated figures again showed that cyber crooks were interested in monetary returns. As adware and trojans formed the main culprits in nearly 50% of the infections, it proved that cyber criminals were inclined to online fraud. This was as per news of Darkreading.com on June 13, 2007.

In the ranking of the ten most forceful malicious codes in June, Downloader.MDW is at the top position. This Trojan downloads further malware onto users' PCs. The well-known Brontok.H worm occupied the second place.

This worm spreads through e-mail attachments. The e-mail messages are in broken English or Indonesian language. The attachments are mostly '.exe' or '.zip' files having random names. The content in the messages relate to preaching or moral policing as they write about 'saying no to drugs' or 'stop free sex'.

After the Brontok.H virus comes Sdbot.ftp, the code that the Brontok family of variants use to download themselves through FTP.

Related article: Spam Scam Bags a Scottish Connection

» SPAMfighter News - 7/27/2007