Welcome Guest. | Log In | Register | Membership Benefits

Report: More Than A Third Of All Malware In History Was Created In 2010

Banking Trojans still dominate the new wave of malware, PandaLabs says

Jan 05, 2011 | 02:45 PM | 

By Tim Wilson

Last year was a biggie for malware creation, according to a report released today.

According to PandaLabs' annual threat report, in 2010 cybercriminals created and distributed one-third of all existing viruses, creating 34 percent of all malware that has ever existed and been classified by the company.

Interestingly, however, growth of new threats has slowed when compared to 2009. Every year since 2003, new threats grew by at least 100 percent, the report says. But in 2010, the increase was approximately 50 percent.

Banker Trojans still dominate the ranking of new malware that appeared in 2010 (56 percent of all samples), followed by viruses and worms. A relative newcomer to the malware landscape, rogueware (fake antivirus software) now comprises 11.6 percent of all the malware gathered and has been given its own category.

The countries leading the list of most infections are Thailand, China, and Taiwan, with 60 to 70 percent of infected computers.

Hackers exploited social media, the positioning of fake websites, and zero-day vulnerabilities as their primary methods of infection. Spam also kept its position as one of the main threats in 2010, despite the dismantling of major botnets during the year. The percentage of email that is spam dropped to an average of 85 percent, according to the study.

Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Dark Reading's editors directly, send us a message.



Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dark Reading encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dark Reading moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. Dark Reading further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
Subscribe to RSS



Vulnerability Management Reports

report Choosing the Right Vulnerability Scanner for Your Organization
Vulnerability scanners can be used to help detect and fix systemic problems in an organization's security program and monitor the effectiveness of security controls. However, a vulnerability scanner can improve the organization?s security posture only when it is used as part of a vulnerability management program, in which products, processes and people are working together to find, identify, prioritize and mitigate threats. Here are some tips on choosing and implementing vulnerability scanners in your enterprise.

report Using Google to Find Vulnerabilities In Your IT Environment
Attackers are increasingly using a simple method for finding flaws in websites and applications: they Google them. Using Google code search, hackers can identify crucial vulnerabilities in application code strings, providing the entry point they need to break through application security. Sound scary? It is, but there is good news: You can use these same methods to find flaws before the bad guys do. In this special report, we outline methods for using search engines such as Google and Bing to identify vulnerabilities in your applications, systems and services--and to fix them before they can be exploited.

report Security Pro's Guide to Patch Management
It's no longer sufficient to patch just Windows, Office and IE. With the massive array of applications now residing on enterprise PCs, and the proliferation of mobile and cloud-based applications, your business is far too vulnerable to exploitation unless you have a solid strategy for patch prioritization, deployment and quality assurance. Follow these steps to put your plan in place.

Other reports from the Vulnerability Management Tech Center:




Featured Webcasts
Featured Whitepapers
Featured Reports