Sunbelt Software Names Top 10 Malware Threats
Sunbelt Software, a provider of Windows security software, has announced the top 10 most prevalent malware threats for the month of August 2009. The report, compiled from monthly scans performed by Sunbelt's antispyware tool, CounterSpy, and its anti-malware solution, VIPRE Antivirus + Antispyware, is a service of SunbeltLabs.
For August, SunbeltLabs reports the password-stealing Trojan threat Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen maintained the top spot on the list, but its prevalence increased by 53.7% month over month, to 7.67% of overall Sunbelt detections from 4.99% in July. Also in August, Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT streaked to the second highest spot on the list with 7.57% of detections. It wasn't on the list in July. Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT is a downloader associated with rogue security programs (also called "scareware"). Once downloaded, the rogues pretend to scan a victim's computer for malware then display false warnings that the machine is infected. It tries to convince victims to purchase useless security software.
"The fact that Zbot is the top detection for the last two months isn't surprising. It's a very versatile piece of malcode that injects code from a remote site to steal information from its victims, including cached passwords, login credentials for web sites (chiefly banks) as well as data in certificates and cookies. It has some backdoor functionality and may record keystrokes," said Michael St. Neitzel, Sunbelt's VP of threat research and technologies. "We first noticed an increased distribution of it in the middle of May and it was distributed through a number of spam campaigns. In one case the spam email purported to be an airline e-ticket and in others it arrived as either an attachment that claimed to be from United Parcel or an alleged e-payment notification of an order with Amazon.com. We have documented more than 2,700 files related to Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen since it was first detected."
Trojan.Win32.Tdss.aalc (v) fell from second on the list in July to third in August with 3.62%, even though that was a higher percentage of detections than in July, when it was 2.92%. Interestingly, the Win32.induc virus, which was highly publicized in August for propagating itself through Delphi development applications, did not make the list. The top ten results represent the number of times a particular malware infection was detected during CounterSpy and VIPRE scans that report back to Sunbelt's community of opt-in users.
The top 10 most prevalent spyware threats for the month of August are:
- Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen 7.67%
- Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT 7.57%
- Trojan.Win32.Tdss.aalc (v) 3.62%
- BehavesLike.Win32.Malware (v) 3.11%
- FraudTool.Win32.Antivirus2010 (v) 2.72%
- Explorer32.Hijacker 2.53%
- Trojan-Downloader.braviax 2.38%
- Trojan.DNSChanger.Gen 2.24%
- Exploit.PDF-JS.Gen (v) 2.23%
- Trojan-Downloader.Zlob.Media-Codec 2.18%
About SunbeltLabs
SunbeltLabs specializes in the discovery and analysis of dangerous vulnerabilities (i.e., security holes, bugs, maligned features or combination of operations) that could be exploited for Internet and email attacks. The research team actively researches new malware outbreaks, creating and testing new threat definitions on a constant basis. For detailed threat research information and to view the top ten threats in real-time please visit SunbeltLabs at http://www.sunbeltsecurity.com.
About Sunbelt Software
Headquartered in Tampa Bay (Clearwater), Fla., Sunbelt Software was founded in 1994 and is a leading provider of Windows security software including enterprise antivirus, antispyware, email security, and malware analysis tools. Leading products include the VIPRE and CounterSpy product lines, Sunbelt Exchange Archiver, CWSandbox, and ThreatTrack. For more information about Sunbelt Software, please visit the company's website at: http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com. To learn more about current activities, products, and ideas at Sunbelt Software, please visit Sunbelt's corporate blog at http://www.sunbeltblog.com.
SOURCE: Business Solutions Magazine