Trojans still dominant e-threat!

Peter Dinham
Sunday, 05 July 2009 11:37

Business IT - Security

Trojans maintained their place as the most dominant worldwide e-threat last month, with one piece of adware – the Trojan.Clicker.CM – the number one infection spreading around the Internet via malicious websites in June.

BitDefender says the Trojan.Clicker.CM – “a simple bit of adware” – was the most prevalent infection for June, followed in second place by Trojan.AutorunINF.Gen, which the security firm says represents a very widespread "family" of malware which uses the Autorun file on shared folders and removable drives to spread.

The third worst e-threat was another Trojan -Trojan.Wimad – which BitDefender says “in its various guises,” heralds an unexpected comeback from a worm which didn’t rank in the top ten last month.

“Heavily used in the wild, Exploit.SWF.Gen is an SWF exploit that lands in fourth place,” reports BitDefender, adding that although it is ageing quickly in terms of existence in the malware world, it is still holding a position in the top 10 due to the wide range of viruses that are still using it as part of their payload.”

Win32.Sality.OG, a rootkit-installing file infector, jumps up three positions from BitDefender’s May top ten e-threats list, moving into sixth place, and ranked fifth is Downadup.Gen, also known as Conficker or Kido. However, BitDefender says the Downadup/Conficker e-threat is on a slight decrease, totaling 3.33-percent of total e-threats in June as opposed to 4.35-percent in May.

The only new e-threat in BitDefender’s June list is Trojan.Skintrim.HTML.A, which it says poses as an Outlook add-in called MailSkinner, but that the Trojan is in fact a rootkit/backdoor combination attempting to download and install additional malware on infected machines.

In eighth position, says BitDefender, Trojan.Autorun.AET used what has undoubtedly become “vulnerability of the year,” - the Autorun bug in Windows - to carve itself 2.08-percent of the total number of infected machines.

And, ninth position is held by NaviPromo, which BitDefender says is an “old adware downloader that found a new lease of life,” describing it as the "dark half" of the infamous Navi toolbar.

Finally, in tenth position in the list of top e-threats, BitDefender lists a generic detection for e-threats packed with NSAnti, which it says is a very popular program used by virus writers to obfuscate the contents of their infected files and reduce their size in transit.