Rise of USB-borne Threats, Conficker back on top
Win32/Conficker is the most widespread computer threat globally as confirmed by the September stats compiled from ESET‘s early warning system – ThreatSense.Net® that tabulates malware data received from millions of its clients. In September, various types of Conficker accounted for 8.76% of all threats. Globally it is concerning to see that one year after Microsoft has issued patches to their OS, that effectively prevent infection with Conficker, computer users are still getting massively infected.
As compared to the month of August, the share of threats INF/Autorun ranked second with 7.53%. Autorun.inf is a feature allowing for automatic execution of files stored on exchangeable media, such as USB devices upon their connection to a PC.
On the contrary, we saw a slight decline when it comes to the occurrence of a mix of trojans targeting online gamers or virtual worlds, such as Second Life. Win32/PSW.OnLineGames has accounted for 6.36% of all detected threats, which is its second lowest share since the beginning of this year.
A family of malware commonly referred to as Win32/Agent known for data stealing has placed fifth in the ranking, as has INF/Conficker, referring to variants of this worm exploiting the Windows OS autorun.inf function.
The top September infections in Ireland were also the USB-infecting Autorun as well as a range of spyware and adware related Trojans. Still very prevalent is the WMA/TrojanDownloader.GetCodec, which infects media files so that when they are played, they ask the user to download and install an additional “codec”, which in turn is usually spyware. Conficker was only in the 17th place in Ireland.
