McAfee First-Quarter Threats Report

sfakiana — Tue, 12 May 2009 14:16:57 +0000

McAfee has released its Threat Report for the first quarter of 2009 (available here). The most significant points of this report are the following:

12 million new IP addresses were taken in control by malicious software, which is a 50% increase since 2008.
The United States is now home to the largest percentage of botnet-infected computers, currently hosting 18 percent of all zombie machines.

More than 800 new variants of the Koobface worm have been discovered in March alone.

The infamous Conficker worm represents a small subset of all threat reports despite the fact that it makes a big contribution to the overall figure of pwned Windows PCs.
AutoRun malware represented 10 percent of reported detections during the first quarter–quite a bit more than Conficker.
Cybercriminals are increasing their use of URL redirects and Web 2.0 sites to disguise their locations.
Junk mail volumes are down 20 per cent in Q1 2009, compared to the same quarter a year ago. Nevertheless, it is stated that cybercrooks are using more advanced tactics to distribute junk mail.
Servers hosting legitimate content have increased in popularity with malware writers as a means for distributing malicious and illegal content.

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