McAfee Threats Report Released for First Quarter 2010

Today we released the McAfee Threats Report for the First Quarter 2010. In it we reveal that USB worms have taken the No. 1 spot for malware worldwide! Spam trends show that email subjects vary greatly from country to country with diploma spam, out of China and other Asian countries, on the rise. Disasters, earthquake reports and other major 2010 news events drive poisoned web searches, and U.S.-based servers host the majority of new, malicious URLs.

Some highlights from the report:

It may surprise many that threats on portable storage devices took the lead for the most popular malware. AutoRun related infections held not only the No. 1 position but also the 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 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 vice president and chief technology officer of Global Threat Intelligence for 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.”

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.

Attackers are leveraging major news events to poison Internet searches. Haiti and Chile earthquake disasters led the list (No. 1 and No. 2, respectively). The Toyota recall, Apple iPad and NCAA March Madness followed. Referred to as search engine manipulation, cybercriminals continue to use analytics and page-ranking logic to exploit hottest search terms and drive traffic to malicious websites.

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 U.S. is due to the location of many different Web 2.0 Services, most of which are provided with U.S. locations. Within the remaining 2 percent, China hosted 61 percent and Canada hosted 34 percent.

The full copy of the Q1 2010 Threats Report can be found here in 9 languages.

Tags: Data Protection, Email & Web Security, Endpoint Protection, Network Security