Six Foot Orc is King of Malware

Davey Winder
Thursday, 28 May 2009 18:55

Business IT - Security

Forget Facebook and tip Twitter out with trash, when it comes to malware threats a new king has been crowned and he's a six foot tall Orc.

Well OK, maybe poetic license took over for a second or two then. But a six foot tall Orc sounds more impressive than W32/Dropper.PTD doesn't it? The connection is that this particular Trojan targets online gamers.

What's more, it seems to be doing rather well in terms of distribution. According to the latest Fortinet Threatscape Report Orc, as I shall refer to it from now on, made up more than a third of all detected malware activity this past month.

Not too surprising when you consider just how many people play multi player games online these days. World of Warcraft might be the biggest and best known but there are countless millions playing other games as well.

Malware in general seems to be having some kind of summer revival being up 66 percent on the April Threatscape report figures. Vulnerabilities and active exploits are at their highest this year so far, and spam has jumped up from last month as well.

Orc, however, dominated the report proving to be the most aggressive of Trojans with a staggering 34.5 percent of all malware activity for the month. To put that into some context, Fortinet informs me that represents the strongest surge by a single malware variant since September 2008.

China, once again, took top spot when it comes to the highest percentage of malware activity worldwide on 44.86 percent and Fortinet reckons this is down largely to the online gaming activity of Orc funnily enough.

The United States were in second place, again, on 37.18 percent followed by Japan (33.52 percent), India (16.19 percent) and Taiwan (15.26 percent.)

When it comes to vulnerabilities, the most active exploit award goes to the Microsoft MS08-067 vulnerability that you probably might have heard of courtesy of Conficker. Oh, and Swine Flu enters the charts thanks to spammers taking advantage of worldwide concerns about people contracting the disease.

Derek Manky, project manager, cyber security and threat research, Fortinet comments "While online gaming threats seem to be most prevalent in Asian countries for the time being, we believe a similar movement will hit North America in the near future as cybercriminals uncover new ground. They have already begun to expand their horizons."