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McAfee unveiled its McAfee Threats
Report: First Quarter 2010, which uncovered that a USB worm has taken
the No 1 spot for top malware worldwide. Spam trends show that e-mail
subjects vary greatly from country to country with diploma spam out
of China and other Asian countries on the rise. Earthquake news and
other major 2010 events drive poisoned Web searches, and US-based
servers host the majority of new malicious URLs.Threats on portable
storage devices
took the lead for the most popular malware. AutoRun related
infections held the No 1 and No 3 spots due to the widespread
adoption of removable devices, mainly USB drives. A variety of
password-stealing Trojans rounded out the top five. Those include
generic downloaders, unwanted programs and gaming software that
collects statistics anonymously. Unlike past studies, the popularity
of these threats ranked consistently worldwide.While spam rates remain
steady, their
subjects vary considerably from country to country. One of this
quarter's biggest discoveries was that China, South Korea and
Vietnam have the most significant diploma spam, which promotes the
purchase of forged documents to establish qualifications for items
such as jobs. Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan have exceptional rates
for Delivery Status Notification spam indicating a possible issue
with preventative mail-filtering capabilities.
“Our latest threat report verifies
that trends in malware and spam continue to grow at our predicted
rates,” said Mike Gallagher, Senior VP and CTO-Global Threat
Intelligence, McAfee. “Previously emerging trends, such as AutoRun
malware, are now at the forefront. We were also surprised to find
some of geographic difference in spam related topics, such as the
volume of diploma spam coming out of China,” he added.
McAfee also found that Thailand,
Romania, the Philippines, India, Indonesia, Colombia, Chile and
Brazil have a higher portion of malware infections and spam. These
countries have experienced significant Internet growth over the past
five years and are lagging in security awareness.
At 98 percent, the United States hosts
the majority of new malicious URLs in Q1 2010, as rated by McAfee
TrustedSource technology. The massive share of new malicious URLs
hosted in the US is due to the location of many different Web 2.0
Services, most of which are provided with US locations. Within the
remaining two percent, China hosted 61 percent and Canada hosted 34
percent.
McAfee has appointed Ambarish Deshpande as Director-Alliances, Channels
& Mid-Market for McAfee, South Asia