BUCHAREST, Romania -- BitDefender®, a global provider of award-winning antivirus software and data security solutions, announced today that the Peed bot – aka "Storm Worm" aka "Nuwar" – was number one on the BitDefender Top 10 malware list for 2007. According to BitDefender Labs, the spread of the Peed bot has placed it higher that the prolific category of trojan downloaders by almost 10 percent overall, at 33.94 percent of total detections in the past twelve months.

BitDefender also released the top 10 spam list for 2007, and BitDefender’s antispam analysts noted the appearance of political spam, which they expect to grow dramatically as the U.S. presidential elections draw nearer.

BitDefender’s malware list contains numerous mass mailers, with the Netsky family still dominating the category with three separate entries. According to BitDefender, Netsky.P is possibly the most harmful and long-lived mass mailer of all time.

In the category of viruses proper, BitDefender identified Sality.M as the most-underrated threat of the year, a highly dangerous polymorphic virus which is spread via mail and other means.

On the file infector front, the "most spread" title goes to Virtob.2, a relatively harmless virus with an unfortunate tendency to infect the same files many times over.

BitDefender’s 2007 Top 10 malware list includes:

“The past year has seen both the tail end of the mass mailer age and the rise of the botnets as the top threat category,” said Viorel Canja, head of BitDefender’s Antivirus Lab. “BitDefender’s top ten for 2007 also reflects a re-emergence of file infectors as a credible threat, primarily because of widespread P2P sharing. We'll see what the future holds."

BitDefender antispam analysts also found that phishing spam was less prominent, but is much more dangerous, as it causes direct losses to victims (stolen bank accounts usually get "cleaned out" within hours or days). The most common type of phishing spam is based on threats to terminate the account being phished, while a second common variation is to ask a customer to enter their account info to "update the banking security app". The templates used to create these e-mails were generally very well-crafted and extremely similar to the web forms used by the target banks, although spelling mistakes and a web address different from that of the original bank were still apparent in many cases.

BitDefender