Security News
July Virus Top 10
Tue, 11 September 2007
Zafi.B won the fight with Netsky.P
Avira presents the top ten most prevalent malware threats for the month of July, which reveals that the number of spam emails is increasing. The spam emails, detected by Avira, represented 81.93 % of all malware identified in July, while only 6.53 % of malicious samples have been classified as viruses and 11.54 % were phishing attacks.
Zafi.B claimed the top spot of the virus hierarchy, winning the battle with the widespread Netsky.P. The Zafi-B worm continues to be extremely successful in infecting computer users, spreading itself by email and peer-to-peer file sharing systems. Zafi.B was very active at the beginning of July but starting from the middle of the month this threat disappeared.
The fifth most harmful virus so far this month was Stration.Gen, which continues to reduce its number of infections.
Five of the malicious samples in this month's top 10 are Mytob versions. This highlights the pain in the neck that these pests represent and the necessity for users to install the patches provided by vendors to fix them.
The malware analyze shows an interesting situation: no new entries, the same old dangerous threats in the top 10 as last month.
But, contrary to this situation, the security experts from Avira discovered a new trick used by cyber criminals. Instead of simply sending emails to several million EBay users and bank customers, they are now selecting their victims distinctively. According to security experts of Avira, these attacks were spying out business secrets, customer data and other sensitive information of certain companies, institutions or authorities. In specialist circles, this type of malware is already known as spear phishing or targeted attacks.
In the future we expect that these concentrated attacks will also increase in Germany and not only.
Here is a shot of our July 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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As for the second part of our malware analyze, there is a tight fight on the phishing rostrum: only 0.93 % between the first and the second places, and 2.84 % between the second and the third places. After dominating the malware hierarchy in June, this month
PayPal was defeated by
EBay.
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For more information on how to recognize a phishing fraud, take your time to read our dedicated page |
The new targets of phishing attacks detected by Avira in July were: Banco AV Villas, banca sella, Banco de Bogotá, Carolina Bank, Clark County Credit Union, First Tech Credit Union, Old Point Bank, Finance Center Federal Credit Union, Monterey County Employees Credit Union, Nevada Federal Credit Union, Equitable Savings and Loan Association, TD Banknorth and UniCredit Banca.
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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