Security News
August Virus Top 10
Wed, 12 September 2007
The Monster case - be thrift with your online personal data!
Avira, a leading provider of professional IT security solutions, presents today the Virus Top 10 for August. After a massive attack in June and the pole position in July, Zafi.B disappeared from the August malware arena, leaving Netsky.P to lead the top 10.
The Mytobs, continues, this month also, to be the most prevalent malware family of our charts, with six variants in the August Virus Top 10, including the new entry - Mytob.CL. This Mytobs family is growing so fast, that it would be difficult in the future to give them names.
Besides the first and the last positions, nothing changed in the August hierarchy.
On the last days of August, a dangerous attack targeted the online community - the Monster cyber fraud. Monster.com, an online job search engine, was the target of the attack where more than one million personal details have been stolen.
A Trojan was seeded to HR persons stealing their login details in order to access all their CVs in their online portfolio. All the stolen personal details were uploaded on a FTP server. One of the reasons could be to create custom-made phishing-emails which could fool the Internet users to download a malware on their computers or even worse, make them give out their credit card or bank details.
The Trojan, which was spying the employers' accounts, was detected by Avira as: TR/Spy.Bancos.aam.249.
To avoid dangerous situations like the Monster case, the users should limit, as much as they can, their online personal data published on public websites. This is not only limited to job sites but also to other community websites such as Linkedin or Xing.
10.22 % of all malware trapped by our special observation networks were represented by phishing-emails and 6.54 % were represented by viruses. The proportion of spam emails intercepted in August reached 83.23 % of all samples intercepted.
Here is a shot of our August Virus Top 10:
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For technical information on any of these worms, please see the detailed descriptions on the Avira website. Also, please keep in mind that all Avira users are perfectly protected against these threats.
Make sure you update your Avira product on a regular basis in order to detect the latest threats.
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The phishing hierarchy of August brings
PayPal back on the first position. The Chase Bank phishing attack reappeared in our charts with 6.68 % of all phishings.
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For more information on how to recognize a phishing fraud, take your time to read our dedicated page |
In August, the new targets of phishing emails discovered by Avira were the following: Banca Sella, Bundesministerium fuer Wirtschaft und Technologie, GoDaddy, BBVA Banco Francés, Steam, Banco di Sicilia,
M&I Bank, Oregon Community Credit Union and
Banca Fideuram.
Avira strongly recommends all users to be careful with suspicious emails and unexpected attachments, no matter what interesting subjects they might claim to be carrying and to update their security product on a regular basis.
For more information on how to recognize a phishing fraud, take your time to read our
dedicated page.Remember that we are here to assist you against the malware threat. Get rid of your doubts when facing a suspect file: just send it to and we will analyze it for you. Take a moment to see how to submit malware and then follow our instructions to send the
suspicious file.
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