Dref And Stratio Head The List Of Malware For December 2006

Anti-virus makers report that the Dref and Stratio malware figured among the top threats in December 2006. According to Sophos, Dref was so common toward the end of December that it replaced Stratio as the most visible malware around. Dref was able to hide itself as an e-mail greeting for the New Year. It was detected only on 30 December 2006. By the next day 93.7 per cent of all malicious e-mails were linked to Dref, while Stratio went down to fourth place with a share of just 7.8 per cent. For the month of December as a whole, Dref accounted for 35.2 per cent of all infections. The first variant of this worm was discovered in July 2005.

Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos, says that businesses should not be taken unaware of this worm since its social engineering strategies aren't new. Ms Theriault adds that Dref spams have been sent out widely over the year-end holidays. There is a possibility that in working through the pile of holiday e-mails people might unintentionally activate the malicious attachment.

The monitoring of the anti-virus firm Kaspersky, however, revealed that Stratio, which the company names Warezov, was in the top three positions in December 2006. Kaspersky Lab said that the Warezov group of worms comprised more than one-third of all viruses known in December 2006. In this month the leadership of the worm army was really a family matter with Warezov.fb taking the place of Warezov.gj. The firm had anticipated this development. The ranking of the former chief fell in a drastic way as it made way for its latest brethren.

A traditional favorite called Netsky came next in terms of dominance, occupying the fourth and fifth spots. Kaspersky's figures say that Netsky took up 14.28 per cent of all malware. In spite of the return of old threats, Sophos arrived at the finding that the share of infected e-mail had not gone up significantly, staying at just one in 337 or 0.3 per cent. Sophos detected 6,251 novel threats in December, which means that the total number of malware it now fights is 207,684.

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» SPAMfighter News - 1/8/2007