Trojans Dominate Top Ten E-Threats for February 2010: Sunbelt

The Internet security firm, Sunbelt Software, in the 1st week of March 2010, published its Top Ten List of e-threats for February 2010.

The ThreatNet cell of Sunbelt found that 7 of the ten most prevalent malware programs continued from January 2010. Moreover, out of those ten threats, 8 were Trojans, underscoring the rise in such type of attack.

The malware that kept on being the most prominent was Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT, a generic Trojan, which was responsible for 33.37% (one-third) of the total infections detected in February 2010. This was very high compared to January 2010 when it contributed only 25% of all infections.

The continued domination of Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT among the top 10 is also because of the general enthusiasm for sporting events, especially the 2010 Winter Olympics. It prompted numerous visits to spurious Internet sites for obtaining live footages of different sporting events that took place during the Winter Games. As traffic surged in the direction of spurious websites that were also potentially malicious, exposure to traditional malware along with scareware increased.

Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen ranks second with 4.10% of total detections. Currently, this malware represents the most harmful Trojan on the Web in terms of privacy infringement. By exploiting system flaws, it creeps into victims' computers and then hacks into their privacy.

Ranking third is Trojan.Win32.Generic.pak!cobra (at 3.37%). This malware is one of the detection for a wide range of malicious programs, which harm 32- and 64-bit Windows OS.

Thereafter, on the fourth position is Trojan.Win32.Generic!SB.0 (3.18%). This is password-stealing Trojan's generic detection which implants keyloggers to capture the user's keystrokes and forwards the information gathered to the remote hacker distributing the malware.

Exploit.PDF-JS.Gen (v) stands fifth (at 2.59%). This too represents a generic detection for maliciously designed PDF files that abuse various vulnerabilities inside the JavaScript engine of Adobe PDF Reader. The purpose is to run malware on the vulnerable system.
Ranking sixth and seventh are Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen (v) (1.74%) and Virtumonde (1.64%) respectively. Virtumonde represents a dangerous adware that abuses backdoor vulnerabilities within Windows XP.

Finally, Trojan.ASF.Wimad (v) (1.54%), Trojan.Win32.Malware (1.52%) and Trojan.Win32.Agent (1.39%) are the eighth, ninth and tenth ranked e-threats respectively in the list released by Sunbelt.

Related article: Trojans to Target VoIP in 2006

» SPAMfighter News - 3/12/2010