Conficker and more. What we should be afraid of?
Permanent member Conficker strongly holds the first places in virus charts; another group of INF/Autorun fades on popularity.
Just like every month ESET Corporation published actual statistics of virus happening, so now we can take a closer look into a present virus romping. It became classics, that Conficker which romps would keep all gold medals in imaginary malware Olympics for a couple of months now. In January Conficker won a first place with a 10% rate so each 10th infection keeps the name of Conficker.
If you fall into a group of people, they don’t have any experience with Conficker yet, we supply, that this worm gets into a PC due to Windows vulnerability. Conficker authors built a huge botnet which is used to process any kind of task (spam sending, targeted attacks on company networks…) and it is controlled remotely. Some variants are spread by the internet, but some of them are spread by replaceable media (USB).
Conficker dominates to most widespread threat statistics.
Botnet building itself represents the biggest imminence in the future, because Conficker infiltration may not be visible for regular users, and may not cause any visible destruction. But over time will all infected PCs make one network, which will become a perfect instrument for massive spam sending, malware spreading, DDoS attacks etc.
Each of these activities are leading to obtain money, but there exists some other direct ways also – many of botnets, serve to next rent. If anyone, for example less technically competent person needs to make an attack to competition or if someone needs to send his own spam, will just pay for temporary rent and can use this army of PC soldiers.
ESET ThreatSence.Net
For completeness’ sake let’s introduce next position on this scrape chart. On the second place is INF/Autorun with 7.37%. The rate of this malware gradually decreases for last 3 months. The same way decreases mix of Trojans Win32/PSW.OnLineGames with 6.23%. Online gamers mainly encounter with this kind of malware. Those Trojans have keylogger (sometimes rootkit) abilities. From previously mentioned statistics it follows that similarly to Conficker, rules the malware world and keeps the long-term high positions many of infections caused by specially customized Autorun information even though it has decreasing tendency.
A new kind of malware reached TOP 10 threat chart also. On the 8th place is JS/TrojanDownloader.Agent with 0.90%. This Trojan can be found on infected web pages. It downloads additional files to users PC and executes them with no permission. Trojan hides his dialogue boxes so user doesn’t see anything. General advice for users they want to avoid infiltration is disabling JavaScript. Firefox users can avoid it by using NoScript extension.
Win32/Packed.Autoit threat with 0, 69 % is on the 10th place on chart of global spread. It is a heuristic detection, related to malware which use Autoit script language.
From those statistics it’s clearly visible, that online threats choose various types and techniques and they are looking for various ways how to infiltrate into the user PC.
Fortunately wise users can make hard times to cheaters by using common sense – just become more cautious while looking for warez and porn online, do not download unknown extensions, and do not trust to unknown invitations. Do not visit unknown websites. Only small percentage of web content is truly for free. If all people realize this, less people will deal with PC harmed by viruses, spyware or malware…
Conficker and more. What we should be afraid of?
Permanent member Conficker strongly holds the first places in virus charts; another group of INF/Autorun fades on popularity.
Just like every month ESET Corporation published actual statistics of virus happening, so now we can take a closer look into a present virus romping. It became classics, that Conficker which carries on would keep all gold medals in imaginary malware Olympics for a couple of months now. In January Conficker won a first place with a 10% rate so each 10th infection keeps the name of Conficker.
If you fall into a group of people, they don’t have any experience with Conficker yet, we supply, that this worm gets into a PC thanks to Windows vulnerability. Conficker authors built a huge botnet which is used to process any kind of task (spam sending, targeted attacks on company networks…) and it is controlled remotely. Some variants spread by the internet, but some of them spread by replaceable media (USB).
Conficker dominates to most widespread threat statistics.
Botnet building itself represents the biggest imminence in the future, because Conficker infiltration may not be visible for regular users, and may not cause any visible destruction. But over time will all infected PCs make one network, which will become a perfect instrument for massive spam sending, malware spreading, DDoS attacks etc.
Each of these activities are leading to obtain money, but there exists some other direct ways also – many of botnets, serve to next rent. If anyone, for example less technically competent person needs to make an attack to competition or if someone needs to send his own spam, will just pay for temporary rent and can use this army of PC soldiers.
For completeness’ sake let’s introduce next position on this scrape chart. On the second place is INF/Autorun with 7.37%. The rate of this malware gradually decreases for last 3 months. The same way decreases mix of Trojans Win32/PSW.OnLineGames with 6.23%. Online gamers mainly encounter with this kind of malware. Those Trojans have keylogger (sometimes rootkit) abilities. From previously mentioned statistics it follows that similarly to Conficker, rules the malware world and keeps the long-term high positions many of infections caused by specially customized Autorun information even though it has decreasing tendency.
A new kind of malware reached TOP 10 threat chart also. On the 8th place is JS/TrojanDownloader.Agent with 0.90%. This Trojan can be found on infected web pages. It downloads additional files to users PC and executes them with no permission. Trojan hides his dialogue boxes so user doesn’t see anything. General advice for users they want to avoid infiltration is disabling JavaScript. Firefox users can avoid it by using NoScript extension.
Win32/Packed.Autoit threat with 0, 69 % is on the 10th place on chart of global spread. It is a heuristic detection, related to malware which use Autoit script language.
From those statistics it’s clearly visible, that online threats choose various types and techniques and they are looking for various ways how to infiltrate into the user PC.
Fortunately wise users can make hard times to cheaters by using common sense – just become more cautious while looking for warez and porn online, do not download unknown extensions, and do not trust to unknown invitations. Do not visit unknown websites. Only small percentage of web content is truly for free. If all people realize this, less people will deal with PC harmed by viruses, spyware or malware…