Various Malware Accounted 172% Growths in 2006

The malware detection in 2006 rose by 172% compared to 2005. The annual report of 2006 by PandaLabs discusses this growth and other issues of the prevailing malware situation.

In January 2007, 33% of the infections were spyware while trojans accounted for 25% of total malware. Other malware items were a distant less than these two. Worms were in the third place with 6% share. The rest that followed were dialers at 5%, backdoor trojans at 4% and bots at 3%.

The trend of a single virus causing massive infections has almost disappeared. Now we have multiple variants creeping into computers. The users falsely believe that there are no threats. But the fact is that there is even more malware now. Last year, PandaLabs detected malware that was equal to the total number in the previous fifteen years, said Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs in a statement that Help Net Security published on March 5, 2007.

In its analysis of the evolution of malware in 2006, the report has assigned trojans the highest popularity label among all malware. These spread silently without any alerts and therefore, mostly used in targeted attacks.

In February 2007, 60% of malware detected were Trojans. That was 11 points higher than the number in January 2007.

A member of the Spamta family of worms, SpamtaLoad.DO is the most recent detected infection. It has been most active during the past few months. The SpamtaLoad.DO spread far and wide accounting for about 40% of the infected e-mails that PandaLabs received every hour.

Bagle.HX was in the second place. The Bagle family of worms was very active in 2006. The Bagle variant employs rootkit features to conceal its activities. It also deactivates some security solutions installed on the systems. These two characteristics make the worm detection very difficult.

Puce.E occupied the third place. The worm infects through peer-to-peer networks. Two other worms, Brantok.H and Nurech.A were in the fourth and fifth positions respectively. Nurech.A spreads via e-greeting cards.

Users must not stop updating their anti-malware programs or downloading security patches in order to maintain strong controls on malicious codes, suggests Corrons.

Related article: Virus Infects Through USB Drives

» SPAMfighter News - 3/19/2007