Top Sources of PC Malware

Malicious Web Sites

The World Wide Web has now become the center of the internet with more than a billion users visiting web sites on a daily basis. Unfortunately, malware writers have also found new ways to infect users’ PC using malicious web sites. The number of malicious web sites, i.e., web sites that infect the users’ PC by downloading harmful programs on the PC without the user’s knowledge, has been increasing rapidly. According to some recent estimates, nearly 1 out of 10 web sites world-wide today have some form of harmful programs that may infect the visitor’s PC.

Email Attachments

Email is a ubiquitous component of everyday business communication. The ease of attaching malware to email, sending it to multiple users simultaneously, and the fact that a user can be sent unsolicited email makes this infection vector effective for spamming, phishing attacks, and worm propagation.

Social Media

A number of well-reputed social networking and Web 2.0 sites were compromised in 2007. The hackers are able to glean very specific information from site such as LinkedIn and Facebook and then use it to disguise their attacks as friendly and authentic solicitations. Given the popularity and interactivity of the social media sites, they tend to expose their users to cyber criminals in nearly the same way as Instant Messaging. We believe that Social Media sites will be one of the top 5 vulnerabilities in 2008.

VoIP

With over 250 million Skype users today, and research that estimates 1.2 billion VoIP users by 2012, the cyber criminals have found a large, attractive and easy target. More than twice the number of VoIP-related vulnerabilities were reported in 2007 versus the previous year—several high-profile “vishing” attacks, and a criminal phreaking (or fraud) conviction—so it’s clear that VoIP threats have arrived and there’s no sign of a slowdown. VoIP attacks are expected to increase by 50 percent in 2008.

Instant Messaging

The National Vulnerability Database reports more than twice the number of AIM (AOL), YIM (Yahoo), and MSN Messenger vulnerabilities for 2007 over the prior year. Even more significant is the finding that there were 10 high-severity risks in 2007, compared with zero in 2006. That’s not all, the top IM virus families of 2005 through 2007 are actively being replace with new and multiple versions making signature based products ineffective. Although IM malware has existed for years, it is likely that the cyber criminals will chose this avenue to attack un-protected PCs.