The latest list of gremlins from security antivirus company Sunbelt Software has been released and shows that throughout July, it was the march of the Trojans that was causing the trouble.

Security antivirus company Sunbelt Software is now part of GFL Software and still publishes a round-up of the most prevalent forms of malware that are threatening people’s computers month to month. The material is gathered from the company’s anti-malware solution, VIPRE Antivirus, and its antispyware tool, CounterSpy.

The month of July heralded an attack by Trojans, as well as the Downad/Conficker worm. A startling 29.08% of the total Trojans detected was the Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT; this isn’t the first month this one has topped the list. It crowned the list in June and in May with similar percentage totals.

Others that have been repeatedly cropping up on this black list are Trojan.Win32.Meredrop, Trojan.Win32.Generic!SB.0 and Trojan.Win32.Malware. Trojan.Win21.Meredrop causes a whole host of problems for the victims it targets; they are a number of Trojans that can install and run different kinds of malware on a machine, often with multiple Trojans and worms. Trojan.Win32.Generic!SB.0 is known for password-stealing, installing keyloggers to that they can identify users’ most personal of passwords.

Francis Montesino, manager of Sunbelt’s malware processing team, said: “Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT is a generic risk that covers a lot of malicious applications. About 120,000 traces are identified under that detected by VIPRE’s signature-based, heuristic or behavioral mechanisms.

“Very often is identifies the downloaders that are used with rogue security programs. These are also called ‘scareware’. Once they get downloaded, the rogues pretend to scan your computer for malware then display false warnings that the machine is infected. They try to convince victims to purchase useless security software.”

The top 10 results are calculated by detecting the number of times a piece of malware infection has been found during scans by VIPRE and CounterSpy technology; these report back to ThreatNet, security antivirus company Sunbelt Software’s community of users. Here, they are given a classification, which can range from moderate all the way up to the very severe. A good look at the list helps internet users to understand the risks they run when surfing the web.

Guest Article by Neil Camp