China Tops in Hosting Malware Sites

Sophos has just released malware statistics. The security research firm's new figures on malware show that China is on the top of the list of nations hosting malware-loaded websites. China for the first time holds the position that was traditionally held by U.S. In 2006 it relayed 35.6% of total infected sites. Arstechnica published this on April 2, 2007.

In Sophos' view all malware is not bad. It cites a case where a German man, 20 years old approached the federal officials last year following the receipt of a virus infected message that apparently was from German legal power. When the man found child porn on his computer he promptly surrendered himself thinking that investigators got down to probe him.

Other items that aren't designed to make monetary gain are also going strong like chain letters and hoax e-mails. In March, Sophos caught 8,835 such threats. The firm's analysts also found that malware infected 0.18% or one out of 555 e-mails. This number has come down dramatically during the past one or two years.

The Hotmail hoax remains the most popular. It admonishes users to forward the message to ten other Hotmail accounts to avoid termination of their own accounts. Tremendous success of such hoax is an indication that general technical familiarity on the Net remains low.

The next most popular e-mail hoax was the stupendous "Olympic Torch" e-mail. This one said that a virus opened an Olympic Torch that would burn the entire C hard drive of the recipient's PC.

Sophos lists the top ten March 2007 malware on the basis of its survey. Netsky constituted 32.7% of all malware; Mytob - 30.4%; Sality - 7.8%; MyDoom - 5.2%; Bagle - 4.1%; Zafi - 3.4%; Nyxem - 2.6%; Stratio - 2.6%; Clogger - 2.4%, and New DwnLdr - 2.0%. Crn published the list on April 3, 2007.

The good side of the Sophos research is that while selecting between China and U.S. as the country with the largest resource for cyber crooks, either country apparently possessed a never-depleting amount of field-tested gifted skills.

Related article: China’s Best Initiatives To Deal With Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 4/10/2007