McAfee Releases First-Quarter Threats Report
Tuesday May 5, 2009 at 4:11 pm CST
Posted by David Marcus
Today McAfee Avert Labs released its Threats Report for the first quarter of 2009. In it we reveal that cybercriminals have taken control of almost 12 million new IP addresses since January, a 50 percent 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. Seems the bad guys are attempting to recover from last November’s takedown of a central spam-hosting ISP by rebuilding their army.
Other Key Findings
The Koobface virus has made a resurgence, and more than 800 new variants of the virus were discovered in March alone.
Servers hosting legitimate content have increased in popularity with malware writers as a means for distributing malicious and illegal content.
Cybercriminals are increasing their use of URL redirects and Web 2.0 sites to disguise their locations.
Compared with the overall landscape, the Conficker worm represents a small subset of all threat reports. AutoRun malware, on the other hand, represented 10 percent of reported detections during the first quarter–quite a bit more than Conficker itself.
You can find the full text of the “McAfee Threats Report: First Quarter 2009″ here.
May 6th, 2009 at 10:40
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May 9th, 2009 at 22:34
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May 12th, 2009 at 13:34
[...] McAfee has released the Q1 threat report for 2009 indicating that cybercriminals have taken over almost 12 million new IP addresses since January, a 50% increase over 2008. The report also indicates a shift in botnet activity, with the US now hosting the largest percentage of botnet-infected computers (80% of all zombie machines – those machines controlled by spammers and others). [...]
May 21st, 2009 at 16:07
[...] at 12:05 am If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!McAfee has released the Q1 threat report for 2009 indicating that cybercriminals have taken over almost 12 [...]