McAfee Threats Report: Second Quarter 2010

[noaccount]

Malware has reached its highest levels, making the first six months of 2010 the most active half-year ever for total malware production. At the same time, spam leveled out, with only 2.5 percent growth from last quarter.

Malware continued to soar in the second quarter, as there were 10 million new pieces cataloged in the first half of this year. Consistent with last quarter, threats on portable storage devices took the lead as the most popular malware, followed by fake anti-virus software and social media malware. With approximately 55,000 new pieces of malware appearing every day, globally AutoRun malware and password-stealing Trojans round out the Top 2 malware threats.

“Our latest threat report depicts that malware has been on a steady incline in the first half of 2010,” said Mike Gallagher, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Global Threat Intelligence for McAfee. “It’s also obvious that cybercriminals are becoming more in tune with what the general public is passionate about from a technology perspective and using it to lure unsuspecting victims. These findings indicate that not only should cybercrime education be more widespread, but that security organizations should move from a reactive to a predictive security strategy.”

After reaching its highest point in the third quarter last year, with nearly 175 billion messages per day, spam rates have hit a plateau. Cybercriminals took advantage of the hype surrounding the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, and used various methods to promote scams and search-engine “poisoning.” Globally, the most popular types of spam varied from country to country with some interesting findings. For instance, delivery status notifications, or nondelivery-receipt spam, were the most popular in United States, Italy, Spain, China, Great Britain, Brazil, Germany, and Australia. Malware spam, or anything that comes with a virus or Trojan attachment urging you to visit an infected website, was the most popular in Colombia, India, South Korea, Russia, and Vietnam. Argentina had the most variety in spam, with 16 topic areas, ranging from drugs to “lonely women” to diplomas. Italy came in with the least variety, with just six types of widely popular spam.

Attackers leveraged major events such as the World Cup and Middle East conflicts to poison Internet searches, although the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was surprisingly absent from the Top 20 toxic search terms. McAfee Labs also saw a resurrection of two “dead” botnets: Storm Worm and Kraken, once considered to be among the biggest botnets on the planet, are again on the rise.

For a full copy of the McAfee Threats Report, Second Quarter in nine languages, please visit: http://www.mcafee.com/us/threat_center/white_paper.html

[safeguy]

I honestly tried to be fair and consider downloading that report but damn fact is I hate McAfee as much as hellnoire hates Norton. Period.

[hellnoire]

I honestly tried to be fair and consider downloading that report but damn fact is I hate McAfee as much as hellnoire hates Norton Symantec. Period.

Corrected, as I hate the whole company, not just "one product".

I've been stung by McAfee once as they bought out the AV my parents were planning on using (Doctor Watson, for those that remember it), and refused to carry over our subscription.

[Ande]

Nothing can be as bad as Norton. At least McAfee lets you remove it from your PC. Norton on lives on forever unless you do a very deep scan.

[noaccount]

Red alert... OT!!!!!!!

[ceyfer]

Oh? I won't be surprise... Our council of doom has initiated their final verdict. Norton is Guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

Gladly, I'm in the right mood to read this important report.

[noaccount]

Also related
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...ms-threat.html

[safeguy]

it is issuing a call to arms for the security industry to get proactive rather than playing the victim

For once, I'm in agreement with McAfee. You know what? I've got to say "Amen" for that

But actions speaks louder than words so they say - I've yet to see that from McAfee. Or you can blame that on my prejudice against them...which in this case, I'm so terribly sorry for. Perhaps someone should give me a tight slap and tell me (or rather prove to me) that McAfee is worth a second look coz till date, I'm not yet convinced/sold. Anyone has any good words in defense of McAfee?

[hellnoire]

McAfee... the only thing positive I've had to say to date is it's better then Norton by one definition: doesn't flag off everything I use.

That's all I could offer you

[Boyfriend]

McAfee is also good at cleaning infected files. They often optimize their existing detections and mostly cure files properly instead of two common options: Quarantine, Delete. This is sometimes very important (assignment, thesis, research paper etc. often are infected due to old file infector viruses still common in some institutions). My current antivirus also cures things properly