By: Ian Mansfield | 21st Feb 2012
McAfee today released the McAfee Threats Report: Fourth Quarter 2011,
revealing that malware surpassed the company’s estimate of 75 million unique
malware samples last year. Although the release of new malware slowed in Q4,
mobile malware continued to increase and recorded its busiest year to date.
“The threat landscape continued to evolve in 2011, and we saw a significant
shift in motivation for cyber attacks,” said Vincent Weafer, senior vice
president of McAfee Labs. “Increasingly, we’ve seen that no organisation,
platform or device is immune to the increasingly sophisticated and targeted
threats. On a global basis, we are conducting more of our personal and business
transactions through mobile devices, and this is creating new security risks and
challenges in how we safeguard our commercial and personal data.”
Malware
The overall growth of PC-based malware actually declined throughout Q4 2011,
and is significantly lower than Q4 2010. The cumulative number of unique malware
samples in the collection still exceeds the 75 million mark. In total, both 2011
and the fourth quarter were by far the busiest periods for mobile malware that
McAfee has seen yet, with Android firmly fixed as the largest target for writers
of mobile malware.
Contributing to the rise in malware were rootkits, or stealth malware. Though
rootkits are some of the most sophisticated classifications of malware, designed
to evade detection and “live” on a system for a prolonged period, they
showed a slight decline in Q4. Fake AV dropped considerably from Q3, while
AutoRun and password-stealing Trojan malware show modest declines. In a sharp
contrast to Q2 2011, Mac OS malware has remained at very low levels the last two
quarters.
Web Threats
In the third quarter McAfee Labs recorded an average of 6,500 new bad sites
per day; this figure shot up to 9,300 sites in Q4. Approximately one in every
400 URLs were malicious on average, and at their highest levels, approximately
one in every 200 URLs were malicious. This brings the total of active malicious
URLs to more than 700,000.
The vast majority of new malicious sites are located in the United States,
followed by the Netherlands, Canada, South Korea and Germany. Overall, North
America housed the largest amount of servers hosting malicious content, at more
than 73 percent, followed by Europe-Middle East at more than 17 percent and Asia
Pacific at 7 percent.
Spam
At the end of 2011, global spam reached its lowest point in years, especially
in areas such as the United Kingdom, Brazil, Argentina and South Korea. Despite
the drop in global levels, McAfee Labs found that the present spearphishing and
spam are highly sophisticated.
Overall botnet growth rebounded in November and December after falling since
August, with Brazil, Columbia, India, Spain and the United States all seeing
significant increases. Germany, Indonesia and Russia declined. Of the botnets,
Cutwail continues to reign supreme, while Lethic has been on a steady decline
since last quarter. Grum made a significant comeback after a long decline,
surpassing Bobax and Lethic by the end of Q4.
Data Breaches
The number of reports of data breaches via hacking, malware, fraud and
insiders more than doubled since 2009, according to privacyrights.org, with more
than 40 breaches publicly reported this quarter alone. The leading network
threat this quarter came via vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows remote
procedure calls. This was followed closely by SQL injection and cross-site
scripting attacks. These remote attacks can be launched at selected targets
around the globe.
Tags: [malware]
[virus]
[spam]
[trojan]
[mcafee ]
Article source: http://www.cellular-news.com/story/53141.php
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