McAfee Quarterly Threats Report Released

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