MS Security Report - Jan-Jun06

FYI…

- http://news.com.com/2102-7349_3-6129235.ht…g=st.util.print
Oct 24, 2006
"Malicious remote control software continues to be one of the biggest threats to Windows PCs, according to a new Microsoft security report*. More than 43,000 new variants of such insidious software were found in the first half of 2006, making them the most active category of malicious software, Microsoft said in a Security Intelligence Report published Monday. In June Microsoft also flagged zombies as the most prevalent threat to Windows PCs. "Attackers, with financial gain in mind, are clearly concentrating a significant amount of development focus on this category of malware," Microsoft said in the report. Of 4 million Windows PCs found to be infected with some kind of malicious software in the first half of this year, about 2 million were running malicious remote control software, Microsoft said. The data is collected by Microsoft's free Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, which runs when security updates are installed on Windows PCs…"
* http://tinyurl.com/w6g9y

FYI…

- http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2036439,00.asp
October 24, 2006
"…Some highlights from the report:
# Backdoor Trojans: The first half of 2006 showed a significant number of new backdoor Trojans. A large number of those belong to bot families, such as Win32/Rbot and Win32/Sdbot. This trend is consistent with anecdotal industry knowledge; owners of bot networks are continually creating and delivering new variants of their bots to maintain their bot networks, and to evade detection by anti-malware products.
# Password stealers and key loggers: These make up the second-largest malware category, in terms of number of variants. Although this type of malware exists worldwide, the Microsoft anti-malware team has seen a high number of variants coming from Brazil. Several thousand new variants from the Win32/Banker and Win32/Bancos families were discovered during the first half of 2006. These mainly use Portuguese for their user interface and primarily serve as a tool to steal bank account information such as passwords.
# Downloaders and droppers: These make up the third-largest category and are used by the attackers to copy files to the victim's system that are necessary to complete the attack and control that system. Downloaders and droppers are also often used to distribute spyware and adware. Because of this, the presence of downloaders and droppers as part of malicious attacks is no surprise.
# Worms: The different types of worm families have a relatively low number of variants, although they remain prevalent. In fact, mass-mailing worms continue to be an effective way to infect a significant number of computers around the world…"

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