A rise in malware has caused the number of infected PCs worldwide to increase 15 percent just from August to September, says a report released Tuesday from antivirus vendor Panda Security.
Across the globe, the average number of PCs hit by malware now stands around 59 percent, an all-time high for the year. Among 29 countries tracked, the U.S. ranked ninth with slightly more than 58 percent of its PCs infected. Taiwan hit first place with an infection ratio of 69 percent, while Norway came in lowest with only 39 percent of its PCs attacked by malware.
(Credit:
Panda Security)
The study found that in the U.S., Trojans and Adware were the two most pernicious types of malware, followed by worms and viruses.
(Credit:
Panda Security)
"This is a clear sign that hackers are becoming more and more sophisticated," said PandaLabs Technical Director Luis Corrons. "Cybercriminals have found news ways to spread their creations, frequently exploiting the latest news stories to launch attacks through social networks, videos, and e-mail. The huge amount of Trojans in circulation is due to the spectacular increase in the number of banker Trojans aimed at stealing user data."
The company based its results on data taken from users who scanned their PCs with the free Panda ActiveScan online tool. The results for September were gathered from August 28 to September 28 and compared with the results from July 28 to August 27.
Updated June 5 10:50 a.m. PST to clarify that scammers were blending their tweets in with legitimate tweets on an already popular PhishTube topic.
Online scammers are targeting people looking for popular topics on Twitter and Google to lure them to Web sites that display fake security warnings and try to sell them antivirus products, PandaLabs said on Wednesday.
This technique isn't new, but seems to be widening on Google and is particularly successful on Twitter where links are spread fast and furiously and people often don't think before they click.
Scammers took advantage of the popularity of "PhishTube Broadcast" on Twitter in order to spread links to sites with fake antivirus malware.
(Credit: PandaLabs)In the Twitter scam, hundreds of fake accounts have been posting tweets that reference the band Phish, which has a cult-like following, according to a PandaLabs blog.
There were so many of the tweets, which say "PhishTube Broadcast," that the term showed up in the Trending Topics list. While there were many legitimate tweets for that topic, scammers posted tweets that contained links that eventually lead to spoof porn pages that infect victims with the fake antivirus malware if they click anywhere on the page, PandaLabs said.
PandaLabs researchers also discovered links to malicious Web sites high up in searches on Google for "Microsoft" and its "Project Natal" gaming technology. The malicious sites display fake messages saying the computer is infected with viruses and offer to sell antivirus software.
The researchers then tried other popular searches and found 16,000 malicious links targeting "YouTube," 10,500 targeting "France" and "airline crash" and thousands of others targeting people searching on "E3," "Sony," and "Eminem" with "MTV Awards" or "Bruno," according to another PandaLabs blog post.
More than 10 million Internet users worldwide were hit with identity fraud-related malware last year, according to a new estimate from Panda Security.
The number of computers infected with active programs designed to steal personally identifiable or financial information that can be used for identity fraud, such as banker Trojans for stealing bank account information, rose by 800 percent from the first half of the year to the second half, the study found.
Of the 67 million computers that PandaLabs analyzed in 2008 for the study, 35 percent of those infected had up-to-date antivirus software installed. The number of users who have been actively exposed to identity fraud malware is about 1 percent of the worldwide population of Internet users, according to the study.
The researchers predict that the infection rate will increase by 336 percent per month throughout this year, based on the trend of the previous 14 months.
Researchers predict that the infection rate will increase by 336 percent per month throughout this year.
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