Trojans & Adware – Most Prevalent Malware in July

PandaLabs has reported that trojans were responsible for 26.65% of infections as detected by the online scanner, ActiveScan, of Panda Security in July 2007. This, together with infections on account of adware at 24.83%, indicates the persistence of codes employed for financial benefits.

The third greatest prevalent malware variety was worms accounting for 8.3% of total infections. Other types of malware causing a large number of infections were backdoor trojans with about 3.75%, dialers with nearly 4% spyware with around 3% and bots with 2.32%, in that order.

A group of several other malware, which although did not have significant percentages individually, but together they were responsible for 28% of the infections, said PandaLabs' technical director, Luis Corrons. Computing News published Corrons' statement on August 2, 2007.

In the list of specific malicious codes with the most frequent detection, the Downloader.MDW Trojan occupied the highest position. This Trojan is created for downloading other malware from the Internet. Below this on the second spot was Brontok.H, and the password-stealing Lineage.BZE Trojan occupied the third place. Fourth in the rankings was the Downloader.OZB Trojan. The fifth spot was for Sdbot.ftp (it is a script that Sdbot worms use to infect systems). Next in the charts were three trojans - Downloader.PJT, Dropper.UN, Perlovga.A.

The July list had six Trojans. These were very popular pieces of malware among cyber criminals because as soon as they infect, they download many more malware that steal sensitive data from users' computers, explained Corrons.

Trojans are widely used because of many reasons, of which the most important is their suitability to grab confidential data. Criminals use such data for churning money that is their main motivation these days, said Corrons in a statement. Help Net Security published Corrons' statement in the second week of July 2007.

PandaLabs reported that in 2006, trojans accounted for 22% of all infections that ActiveScan detected while adware represented 33% of the infections. But this trend changed in the first six months of 2007. During that period, trojans came to replace adware as the most dangerous malicious code. In 2007, there was maximum detection of the Trojan malware on users' systems.

Related article: Trojans to Target VoIP in 2006

» SPAMfighter News - 8/17/2007