the latest trends in malware

Kaspersky Lab has posted its latest report on malware evolution. If you are at all interested in viruses, worms, adware, botnets, and phishing, this is a must-readme. Email worms are fading out, IM worms are growing fast, hijacking valuable objects from MMOGs is big time in Asia, and botnets are "the greatest threat to the Internet as we know it."

Researchers estimate that the number of zombie machines in botnets increases by 300,000 to 350,000 every month. The total number of zombies is estimated at several million. All of these infected machines are being actively used by cyber criminals as spamming platforms in order to make money. Botnets can also be used in DoS attacks and to spread new malware - such threats often lead site owners to pay cyber criminals not to attack their sites. Botnets are also used to mail out more and more new Trojans that harvest and send banking information to the controller. Today, virus writers from Brazil dominate this area of cyber crime.

Their virus analysts have a blog as well.

[via Steve Loughran]

Posted by Gene at April 20, 2005 05:16 PM