PandaLabs, the anti-malware laboratory of Panda Security –The Cloud Security Company- has published its Annual Malware Report.

The report reviews the major incidents and events concerning IT security in 2009. The outstanding trend of the last 12 months has been the prolific production of new malware: 25 million new strains were created in just one year, compared to a combined total of 15 million throughout the rest of the company’s 20-year history.

This latest surge of activity included countless new examples of banker Trojans (some 66%) as well as a host of fake antivirus programs (rogueware). The report also draws attention to the resurgence of traditional viruses, previously on the verge of extinction, such as Conficker, Sality or the veteran Virutas. See the graph here.

During 2009, spam was also highly active: some 92% of all email traffic was identified as spam. The tricks used to dupe potential victims into opening these emails have focused heavily on exploiting current affairs and dramatic news stories -a tendency which also applied to SEO attacks-. As such, we saw waves of junk mail related to celebrity scandals or deaths (real or fictitious), swine flu, compromising videos of politicians, etc. This year PandaLabs also tracked how spam impacted different industrial sectors, revealing how the automobile and electrical industries were the worst affected, followed by government institutions.

As regards malware distribution channels, social networks (mainly Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Digg), and SEO attacks (directing users to malware-laden websites) have been favored by cyber-criminals, who have been consolidating underground business models to increase revenues.

The Annual Malware Report also examines how individual countries and regions have been affected throughout the year, based on the data gathered from computers scanned and disinfected free of charge with Panda ActiveScan. Taiwan tops the rankings, followed by Russia, Poland, Turkey, Colombia, Argentina and Spain. Countries suffering fewest infections include Portugal and Sweden.
You can see this graph here.

Last year also saw a rise in the number of news stories related to cyber-attacks with political motives or targets, suggesting that this is no longer the preserve of sci-fi movies and conspiracy theorists and is now becoming a reality.

Finally, and as we announced some days ago, PandaLabs has predicted that the amount of malware in circulation will continue to grow during 2010. Windows 7 will surely attract the interest of hackers when it comes to designing new malware, and attacks on Mac will increase. While we are likely to witness more politically motivated attacks the report concludes that, once again, this will not be the year of the cell phone virus.

Computer Clarity

PandaLabs, the anti-malware laboratory of Panda Security, has released its forecast of computer threat trends for the coming year.

More clouds on the security horizon

Welcome to the cloud. In 2007, we launched our first product which took advantage of the cloud, now in 2009 all our products use it and we have launched the first 100% cloud-based antivirus: Panda Cloud Antivirus. We have also seen this year how other major security vendors have followed our steps and taken to the cloud. 2010 will be the year in which all anti-malware companies wanting to offer real-time protection will have to follow suit. And those that don’t will be out of the game.

An avalanche of malware

The amount of malware in circulation will continue to grow exponentially. The greater speed delivered by cloud-based technologies, such as Panda’s Collective Intelligence, will force malware creators to generate even more threats in order to evade detection and elimination. Once again malware will be designed almost exclusively for financial gain, and we can expect to see many new fake antiviruses (rogueware), bots and banker Trojans.

Social engineering

Cyber-criminals will again be focusing on social engineering techniques to infect computers, particularly those targeting search engines (BlackHat SEO) and social networks, along with ‘drive-by-download’ infections from Web pages.

As the football World Cup takes place in South Africa, we can also expect to see significant amounts of malware related to this event: false ticket offers, junk mail, etc. It is always a good idea to take a suspicious view of any messages related with current affairs and large events such as this.

In the case of social networks, there have already been many examples of worms and Trojans targeting Twitter, Facebook, etc. Malware creators will continue to be drawn to these types of platforms used by so many people.

Windows 7

Windows 7 will have a major impact on malware development: where Windows Vista hardly caused a ripple, Windows 7 will make waves. One of the main reasons is the widespread market acceptance of this new OS, and as practically all new computers are coming with Windows 7 64-bit, criminals will be busy adapting malware to the new environment. It may take time, but we expect to see a major shift towards this platform over the next two years.

Cell phones

Will 2010 be the year of malware for cell phones? Several security companies have been warning for some time that malware is soon to affect cell phones in much the same way as it affects PCs. Well, we hate to rain on their parade, but 2010 will not be the year of malware for cell phones.

The PC is a homogenous platform, with 90% of the world’s computers running Windows on Intel, meaning that any new Trojan, worm, etc. has a potential victim pool of 90% of the world’s computers. The cell phone environment is much more heterogeneous, with numerous vendors using different hardware and different operating systems.

Applications are sometimes not even compatible from one OS version to another. So it is once again unlikely that 2010 will see widespread targeting of cell phones by malware. In any event, this year will witness many changes in the world of mobile telephony with more smartphones offering practically the same features as a PC; the emergence of Google Phone –first phone sold directly by Google without tying users to specific operators-; the increasing popularity of Android, not to forget the success of the iPhone. If in some years there are only two or three popular platforms, and if people begin to operate financial transactions from their cell phones, then maybe we could talk about a potential breeding ground for cyber-crime.

Mac

Mac: has the danger arrived? Mac’s market share has increased in recent years. Although the number of users has yet to reach the critical mass required to make it as profitable as PCs for cyber-criminals, it is nevertheless becoming more attractive. Mac is used just as PCs are to access social networks, email, the Internet… and these are the main malware distribution systems used by cyber-criminals. Consequently, Mac is no longer a safe haven against malware. These criminals can easily distinguish whether a system is Mac, and they have malware designed especially to target this OS. In 2009 we have already seen numerous attacks, and there are more to come in 2010.

The Cloud

Cloud-based services are not just used for security. We are all using more services delivered from the cloud, often without realizing. Who doesn’t use Hotmail or Gmail as their email service, or Flickr to store photos? But cloud-based services are not limited solely to storage, they are also used for processing data. The cloud is a tool that can help save considerable costs for companies, and as such is rapidly growing in popularity. This makes attacks on cloud-based infrastructure/services far more likely.

Cyber war

Although this term is more associated with science fiction than the real-world, it’s a phrase we are about to start hearing more often. Throughout 2009, governments around the world including the United States, the UK and Spain, have expressed concern about the potential for cyber-attacks to affect economies or critical infrastructure. We also saw this year how several Web pages in the United States and South Korea were the subject of attacks, with suspicion –as yet unapproved- pointing at North Korea. In 2010 we can expect to see similar politically-motivated attacks.

Computer Clarity

Over the last ten years, I have removed close to a half million viruses from thousands of computers.  One of the most common questions that I am asked is: “Why do these people write viruses?”  The answer is that there are several types of people writing different types of malware for several different purposes.  Here are some examples:

Vandals-
These people are like the punks that vandalize property for fun.  They are in small cliques and they try to impress each other by infecting the most computers in the shortest amount of time.  One virus from around seven years ago infected over 250,000 computers in 24 hours.  This one made all of the desktop icons run away from the mouse arrow.  This group of cyber-vandal virus writers wrote most of the early viruses, but as a percentage of all viruses discovered to date, they are less significant than some of the other groups.

People with a grudge-
Another small group of people who wrote many early viruses are the people with grudges against Microsoft, the government, corporations, or specific professions.  One virus from around six years ago called Magistrate targets attorneys.  This virus would infect a computer, search for any document containing legal terms and mail it out to everyone in the address book.  Other viruses would infect as many computers as possible, then tell all of them at the same time to try to access a web site or other internet server causing such high traffic that the server shuts down.

Cyber Warfare against the United States-
Over the last five years, another form of covert warfare has emerged.  Many antivirus companies have reported a high number of viruses originating in China, North Korea, and Iran.  They also report that these viruses seemed to be designed to infect English speaking countries specifically.  This is The Art of War in its perfect modern adaptation: never attack your enemy army directly when you can weaken your enemy infrastructure indirectly.   By infecting home, business, and government computers, the enemies of the United States can decrease our overall productivity, increase our population’s general level of stress and irritation, and possibly steal some secrets along the way.

Info Thieves-
These are the writers of the spyware floating around the internet.  They are looking for passwords, account numbers, social security numbers, and anything else that would give them access to your credit, money, or your identity.  This group and the next are both the fastest growing and the most damaging types of threats.

Viruses for Profit-
This group started out writing the adware that makes all of the popup ads fill a computer screen every time the computer connects to the internet.  They make arrangements with advertisers to get paid a few pennies every time their popup ad hits a desktop.  With a few hundred ads popping up on a few hundred thousand computers every day, these viruses generate income.  But a much more serious threat in this group has emerged.  Rogueware is software that impersonates an antivirus and attempts to entice the computer user to install the virus with warnings of viruses.  This is the biggest and fastest growing type of computer malware that I have seen so far.

<a href=”http://www.computerclarity.com/clarity-blog/?p=6″>See my article
concerning rogueware for more information.</a></p>

As you can see, the question “Why do people write viruses” has a logical answer.  Even if there are several types of virus writers with several motivations, people write malicious software because they are malicious people.

Computer Clarity

According to Panda Security and PandaLabs, the global leaders in computer security, “Rogueware consists of any kind of fake software solution that attempts to steal money from PC users by luring them into paying to remove nonexistent threats.”  They also point out the following facts:

• Rogueware attacks generate approximately $34 million per month for cybercriminals
• Each month rogueware infects approximately 35 million computers
• Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Digg, are used to spread rogueware
• Eastern Europe is the source of the majority of cybercriminals
• Rogueware is difficult to detect because it changes quickly

Because of these facts, your computer will encounter rogueware and your antivirus might not catch it.  So, what does a rogueware attack look like?  A window appears on your computer screen announcing the presence of viruses on your computer and offering to remove them if you pay them $40-$90.  If you don’t, the program starts hiding different windows controls and continues to warn you with popup windows until you do pay.  Then they will wait a random period of time before they do it again.  Once the rogueware is installed, it can be very difficult to remove, so it is best to catch and stop the installation attempt.  Fortunately this is very easy.  Rogueware tries to look like an antivirus.  You must know who your antivirus company is and don’t trust any other antivirus warning.  When you see a warning, identify what program is issuing the warning.  If it is not your antivirus software, then it is a rogue security officer trying to gain entry into your computer.

When this occurs on your computer you must close the window without following any of its instructions and without touching the window.   You must use the taskbar button below that represents the window, right click it, then hit close.  This should close the window, but if it does not, press and hold your power button on your computer.  You may lose any unsaved work, but it is better than removing the rogueware after the infection.

Rogueware and other types of malware threats are extremely prolific on the internet.  Antivirus companies are trying franticly to keep up with the threat, but only one is on top of it.  Panda Security makes and distributes the best computer security solutions and PandaLabs discovers the threats and writes the antivirus updates before the rest of the antivirus companies even know about it.  Several teams, each specialized in a specific type of malware (viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware, phishing, spam, etc), work 24/7 to provide global coverage. To achieve this, they also have the support of TruPrevent® Technologies, which act as a global early-warning system made up of strategically distributed sensors to neutralize new threats and send them to PandaLabs for in-depth analysis. According to Av.Test.org, PandaLabs is currently the fastest laboratory in the industry in providing complete updates to users. According to my own test, Panda Security Solutions are the best available.

Computer Clarity