Forget Conficker, there’s a new threat driving past your computer!

By Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 14 April 2009 17:02

Technology

Security warnings about the impending Conficker worm attacks on computers around the globe have been with us for a while now, and as iTWire reported just a few days ago, while the predicted apocalypse didn’t engulf the world after all, the worm’s still out there.  But, be warned, we’re now in the midst of a new security threat of large-scale proportions, according to Kapersky!

As Davey Winder told you in iTWire a few days ago, Trend Micro reported that, since the early warnings about impending attacks by Conficker, the worm had indeed now revealed its hand in the form of links to the Waledac malware family and amidst talk of rogue antivirus installations.

Now, it seems, we’ve moved on to no less than a large-scale, global epidemic of drive-by downloads where a malicious program is automatically downloaded to your computer without your consent or knowledge.

To underpin its warning about this new epidemic, Kapersky in its latest security report says that over a recent 10-month period the Google anti-malware team crawled billions of pages on the Web in search of malicious activity and found more than three million URLs initiating drive-by malware downloads.

According to Kapersky, hackers increasingly compromise legitimate Web sites and either secretly embed an exploit script or plant redirect code that silently launches attacks via the browser.

Kaspersky’s security evangelist, Ryan Naraine, in an article titled -  Drive-by Downloads: The Web Under Siege – warns that drive by malware delivery is of increased appeal to cybercriminals simply because it is, in general, a stealthier form of infection that results in more successful attacks.

Naraine says that, according to ScanSafe, 74 percent of all malware detected in the third quarter of 2008 came from visits to compromised Web sites.
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