McAfee Reveals Top 5 Malware,Spam Trends Worldwide

McAfee Inc. has unveiled its, “McAfee Threats Report : First Quarter 2010” , which uncovered that a USB worm has taken the No. 1 spot for top malware worldwide. Spam trends show that email subjects vary greatly from country to country with diploma spam out of China and other Asian countries on the rise.

“Our latest threat report verifies that trends in malware and spam continue to grow at our predicted rates,” said Mike Gallagher, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Global Threat Intelligence, McAfee. “Previously emerging trends, such as AutoRun malware, are now at the forefront. We were also surprised to find some of geographic difference in spam related topics, such as the volume of diploma spam coming out of China.”

A few findings of the report :

• Threats on portable storage devices took the lead for the most popular malware.

• AutoRun related infections held the No. 1 and No. 3 spots due to the widespread adoption of removable devices, mainly USB drives.
• A variety of password-stealing Trojans rounded out the top five.These include generic downloaders, unwanted programs and gaming software that collects statistics anonymously.
• China, South Korea and Vietnam have the most significant diploma spam, which promotes the purchase of forged documents to establish qualifications for items such as jobs.
• Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan have exceptional rates for Delivery Status Notification spam indicating a possible issue with preventative mail-filtering capabilities.
• At 98 percent, the United States hosts the majority of new malicious URLs in Q1 2010.
• Attackers are leveraging major news events to poison Internet searches. Haiti and Chile earthquake disasters led the list (No. 1 and No. 2, respectively).