BitDefender: Trojans amounted for half of threats in June

by Steve Ragan - Jul 3 2009, 17:00

BitDefender released its monthly threat list this week, providing an insight into online threat levels during the month of June. According to BitDefender, Trojans are continuing their drive towards Internet domination, accounting for half of the month's leading threats.

The top two spots, Clicker.CM and AutorunINF.GEN, accounted for 10.13 percent and 10.04 percent respectively of all Malware counted in June, BitDefender said. AutorunINF.GEN, which was number one in May, fell to second place in June, while Clicker, one of the most common threats this year, owes its successful rate of infection to its ability to bypass pop-up filters and applications.

Wimad, the Trojan ranked in third place with 5.6 percent of infections, didn’t even rank in May. There are several variants of this Trojan, most of which are detected by the majority of AV detection methods. An SWF exploit heavily used in the wild landed in fourth place. Although old, it probably owes its position to the large number of different viruses that still include it in their armory, outlined BitDefender.

Autorun.AET used what has undoubtedly become “vulnerability of the year,” -- namely the AutoRun bug in Windows -- to carve itself 2.08 percent (eighth place) of the total number of infected machines in June. Interestingly, Downadup, better known as Conficker, listed in fifth place with 3.33 percent of the month's infections. Conficker infections dropped slightly from the 4.35 percent listed in May.

Sality.OG, a rootkit-installing file infector, jumped three positions on the e-threats list, moving into sixth place, while Skintrim.HTML.A in seventh place made the list as a new arrival this month. The Skintrim.HTML.A Trojan poses as an Outlook add-in called MailSkinner. In reality, once Skintrim infects a system, it acts as a backdoor for installing other types of Malware.

NaviPromo, an old adware downloader enjoying a new lease of life, came in at number nine. You might know the NaviPromo Malware as the dark side to the Navi toolbar. NSAnti, a very popular program used by virus writers to obfuscate the contents of their infected files and reduce their size in transit, has a generic detection listed that rounded out the list in tenth place.

Want regular updates from The Tech Herald? Follow us on Twitter.

Interested in a more interactive TTH? Join our Facebook Group.

Around the Web