Trojans and Adware, the Most Active Threats in October

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Trojans and Adware, the Most Active Threats in October

According to data from the Panda ActiveScan online antivirus solution, Trojans and adware were the most active threats in October. Specifically, they were responsible for 25.97% and 23.37% respectively of all infections detected.

"Trojans can be used for a range of criminal activities, generating large profits for their creators, either directly through the theft of information that can be used for online fraud or indirectly by charging advertisers for sending spam through botnets", explains Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs. "Adware can also be highly profitable, largely thanks to the unscrupulous marketing companies that pay the creators of this type of malicious code to display unsolicited advertising".

After adware and Trojans come worms, a type of malware that is becoming increasingly less common thanks to the new malware dynamic, where threat creators are motivated solely by money. This type of malicious code which was once responsible for some of the worst virus epidemics in history, are now fading into the background. In October, just 8.31% of infections were caused by this kind of threat.

Other threats types that caused problems during the last month included backdoor Trojans (3.97%), spyware (3.16%), dialers (2.84%) and bots (2.33%).

The most active specific strain of malware was the Downloader.MDW Trojan. This was followed by the adware PC-Prot, which appeared for the first time in the ranking, and in third place, the Downloader.OZB Trojan.

Following these came the Trojan Lineage.BZE, the backdoor Trojan W32/IRCbot.BEP.worm and the Brontok.H and Puce.E worms.

The final places in the list were occupied by malicious code that did not figure in last month's ranking: the backdoor Trojan Hupigon.AZG, the Trojan Dropper.UN and the script Sdbot.ftp, used by worms of this family to spread via FTP.

Name - Previous position
1. Trj/Downloader.MDW - 1;
2. Adware/PC-Prot - New;
3. Trj/Downloader.OZB - 3;
4. Trj/Lineage.BZE - New;
5. W32/IRCbot.BEP.worm - 2;
6. W32/Brontok.H.worm - 8;
7. W32/Puce.E.worm - 7;
8. Bck/Hupigon.AZG - New;
9. Trj/Dropper.UN - New;
10. W32/Sdbot.ftp.worm - New.

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