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By Mel Duvall
The first half of 2010 was the most active six months for malware ever, according to anti-virus software vendor McAfee, with fraudsters taking advantage of interest in the World Cup and free virus protection scams.
In its second-quarter 2010 report, McAfee said there were 10 million new pieces of malware catalogued in the first half of the year, with approximately 55,000 pieces of new malware appearing every day.
“Our latest threat report depicts that malware has been on a steady incline in the first half of 2010,” said Mike Gallagher, McAfee’s senior vice president and chief technology officer for threat intelligence. “It’s also obvious that cybercriminals are becoming more in tune with what the general public is passionate about from a technology perspective and using it to lure unsuspecting victims.”
Cybercriminals took advantage of the excitement and interest surrounding the FIFA World Cup in South Africa and used various methods to promote scams and “poison” search engines with links to infected sites. Attackers also leveraged major events such as Middle East conflicts and natural disasters to poison Internet searches.
Brazilian soccer fans -- basically the entire country -- were among the hardest hit as one attack tricked users into clicking on a button which supposedly showed the team’s coach, Carlos Verri (commonly known as Dunga), in a fisticuff with angry fans. After clicking on the link, the attack downloaded a password stealing Trojan.
Surprisingly, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was absent from the top 20 toxic search items. That may have been in part due to efforts by BP to buy up a number of search terms related to the topic including ones featuring such attributes as “oil spill” and “claims” and “volunteer.”
In addition, McAfee said it saw a resurrection of two botnets, Storm Worm and the spam-spewing Kraken, once considered to be among the biggest botnets on the planet. McAfee said both were considered to be “dead” or dismantled, and their reemergence is a disturbing trend.
On the positive side, spam appeared to level out in the quarter, with only a 2.5 percent increase from the first quarter of 2010. Globally, it appears most countries are targeted by the same types of spam scams, from ads for adult products to easy money cons. However, there were a few interesting regional variations.
Argentina had the most variety in spam, with 16 different predominant topic areas, ranging from drugs to lonely women, to diplomas. Italy had the least variety, with just six predominant types of spam. The most common was the Delivery Status Notification message, where the user receives a non-delivery receipt message that usually bounces to a forged address.
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