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Tricksters employ global trends

By Ilva Pieterse, ITWeb contributor
Johannesburg, 04 Aug 2006

PandaLabs has identified the Da Vinci Code and the 2006 World Cup as the subjects used for the most infamous IT threats for the first half of the year.

The Da Vinci Code was used as bait for a cellphone virus. The first case of this nasty bug was reported on 24 May when Mridul Sharma, during a corporate presentation, received a message on his phone: "Receive message via Bluetooth from Da Vinci Code?"

Social engineering tricks using the 2006 FIFA World Cup as a lure began as far back as May 2005. These kinds of subjects are used to propagate e-mails carrying Trojans, so please beware. Other popular subjects include photographs of Milosevic, of Michael Jackson during his trial, and latest news about Arafat.

Mars sham

Be careful of hoaxes - always do your research, and avoid irritating friends and colleagues or sending everyone into a forwarding frenzy.

Ilva Pieterse, ITWeb journalist

The infamous Mars hoax is doing the rounds again and MicroWorld Technologies is urging people not to forward it on. The e-mail states that Mars will reach its closest to Earth on 27 August making it appear as big as the moon, and this will not happen again until the year 2287.

Be careful of hoaxes - always do your research, and avoid irritating friends and colleagues or sending everyone into a forwarding frenzy. Hoax e-mails may appear pretty harmless, but on a large scale they do cause system slow-downs and unnecessary costs.

Love hurts

Good old sex is still proving to be an efficient hook. Sophos is warning of a certain spyware Trojan that is downloaded to your machine while displaying a slideshow of lovely "Victoria Stasova" - your potential Russian love match.

Once installed, this Keylog-HD Trojan then steals key strokes and other information that can be used to plunder bank accounts or commit identity theft.

Please ignore this black widow - looking for love in all the wrong places will only make you broke. Make sure you close any pop-ups of this devious beauty as fast as you can, and keep your AV up-to-date.

July top 10

PandaLabs says July`s threat trends are similar to the rest of 2006. Still at the top of the list is Sdbot.ftp, and second place goes to W32/Bagle.pwdzip. The rest of the list of nasties includes W32/Netsky.P.worm, Trj/Torpig.DC, Exploit/Metafile, W32/Ailis.A.worm, W32/Parite.B, Trj/Qhost.gen, Trj/Jupillites.G, and Bck/Manshi.G.

SoftScan claims that 90% of all e-mail scanned during July was spam, with the highest spam day occurring on 15 July, with about 96% of e-mail scanned accounting for spam.

Additionally, according to the e-mail security company, the top five virus groups are:

1 Phishing: 63.57%
2 Netsky: 10.02%
3 Mytob: 9.64%
4 Bagle 7.17%
5 Mydoom 3.31%

Far East

Despite anti-virus vendors` opinions of what is the worst form of malware, one thing is for certain - the majority of worms, viruses, spam and Trojans originate in the Far East.

During July, Malaysia, China and the Philippines were all especially noted as a major source of malware, with Kuala Lumpur at the top spot. Unfortunately, this all goes back to the slack laws governing IT security in these countries, making them gardens of Eden for hackers.

 

Sources used: MicroWorld Technologies, PandaLabs, The Channel Show, SecurityPark.net

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