A malicious program dropping particularly dangerous malware has made it to the second place of VirusBuster´s toplist of the most frequently detected threats in May,”It has been no surprise to us that the toplist is led by Trojan.DL.Small. Trojan downloaders such as this one are still intensively distributed by cybercriminals. May's silver medalist, however, deserves much more attention. Trojan.DR.TDSS is a so-called dropper, i.e. a pro-gram that is designed by cybercriminals to plant other malicious code into the victim's ma-chine.
The strain on our list drops a particularly dangerous rootkit (a kind of malware that infects low level system files and can collect confidential data). Once a rootkit has been in-stalled, it is very difficult to detect and remove it”, commented on May's statistics Virus-Buster expert Gábor Szappanos.
Trojans got their name from the legendary wooden horse built by the Greeks to defeat Troy. They pretend to serve users, but in fact they are designed to cheat their victims. Many trojans set off (fake) alarm bells warning the user of a virus infection, and then download a rogue antivirus application.
The downloaded program promises to clean the machine, but it either does nothing (the better option), or starts some malicious activity. The user is often charged for such a download, so these trojans are, in fact, tools for fraud. They mostly come in e-mail attachments. Spammers disguise them as some useful file, such as an order confirmation. Opening the attachment, however, launches the infection mechanism.
Many malicious programs are distributed by botnets, i.e. networks of unknowing victim PCs (called zombies). Moreover, many of them are designed to turn the infected machine into a zombie as well. Even if it doesn't seem to cause any harm, users should get rid of botnet malware as soon as possible, since otherwise they may become accomplices in the cy-bercriminals´ activities, Gábor Szappanos warned.
In line with its slogan about the company´s faithful dog (”Buster is always vigilant”), Vi-rusBuster continuously monitors computer virus occurrence and activity. Data from the firm´s mail protection systems – in-house and externally deployed alike – is collected and processed. VirusBuster then uses the results to generate monthly statistics of the most fre-quent infections.
More from the source: virusbuster.hu
16.06.2011