McAfee Security Threat Report
McAfee’s latest security threat report (covering January to March, 2009), reveals that since January, over 12 million new IP addresses have been hi-jacked by cybercriminals, a 50% increase since 2008.
IP addresses are hijacked and their computers used as zombies within worldwide botnets. A zombie will then be used to send out spam email, infecting other machines which will in turn send out even more email, and so the process goes on, creating billions of spam emails which clog up the system.
The U.S. is home to the greatest percentage of botnet infected computers, accounting for nearly 20% of all zombie machines.
Cybercriminals are rushing to create new botnets after the shakedown of a major spam hosting ISP, McColo Corp, in November 2008 which cut spam levels by some 60%.
And the cybercriminals are quickly recovering the ground that they had lost, with spam volumes now about 70% of what they were before McColo was stopped.
Jeff Green, senior vice president of McAfee Avert Labs, said: “The massive expansion of these botnets provides cybercriminals with the infrastructure they need to flood the web with malware. Essentially, this is cybercrime enablement.”
The report came up with a number of other findings, including that the Koobface virus has made a resurgence. More than 800 new variants of the virus have been discovered in March 2009 alone.
Also, malware writers are increasingly using servers which host legitimate content to launch malicious and illegal content.
URL redirects are being used more often by cybercriminals and the use of web 2.0 sites are being used to hide their location.
Ironically, given the recent media fuss about Conficker, the report concludes that this worm, and all its variants, only accounted for some 10% of detections reported during the first quarter. But whether this means it was over-hyped, or hasn’t yet had the affect feared, remains to be seen.
Guest Article by Neil Camp
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My name is Alan Potts and I'm the Editor of the Antivirus-BUYability web site and Managing Director of BUYability Limited. You can connect with me or keep up to date with new posts on this blog via the following social media sites: 
