Surge of new ISM threats in April

ESET, a global provider of security software for enterprises and consumers, says that April showed ‘renewed vigour’ among new information security threats, with the top five representing nearly 14 percent of all threat activity for the month.

The most reported threat was Win32/TrojanDownloader.Ani.Gen, which exploits how Windows handles animated cursor (.ani) files. During the month of April, close to 5 percent of all detections were of the Ani.Gen threat, as malware writers made the most of this latest vulnerability in the operating system.

“This type of attack exposes even fairly sophisticated users to ‘drive by’ attacks that can compromise their computers,” said Randy Abrams, director of education, ESET, in a recent blog entry. “For web browsing, the use of virtualization technologies such as SandboxIE can afford some protection, but e-mail still remains a potential attack vector. Although, forcing Outlook to render e-mail in plain text is a mitigating tactic, Outlook Express will remain vulnerable to attack, even when configured to render e-mail in plain text.”

ESET’s top 10 ISM threats in April 2007:

1 Win32/TrojanDownloader.Ani.Gen – 4.95% of reports
2 Win32/PSW.Agent.NCC – 2.85%
3 Win32/Pacex.Gen – 2.21%
4 TrojanDownloader.Agent.AWF– 1.80%
5 Win32/Perlovga – 1.45%
6 Win32/Adware.Boran – 1.30%
7 Win32/PSW.QQRob – 1.27%
8 Win32/Nuwar.gen – 1.18%
9 Win32/Netsky.Q – 1.17%
10 Win32/Adware.Virtumode – 1.14%

www.eset.co.uk

•Date: 15th May 2007 • Region: World •Type: Article •Topic: ISM
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