Generic and behavior-based threats increasing

Sunbelt Software announced the top 10 most prevalent malware threats for the month of March 2010.

The list shows the continued prevalence of Trojan horse programs circulating on the Internet and the growing trend of generic and behavior-based detections in antivirus detections. Generic and behavior-based detections by the antivirus industry have improved thanks to the massive increase in new malcode, which number thousands per day.

The top two detections for the month remained in the same positions as last month. Both Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT (31.07 percent) and Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen (4.97 percent) maintained approximately the same pervasiveness in the overall malware tracked.

The top 10 made up more than 50 percent of all detections for the month and the top two made up greater than 36 percent of all detections.

Sunbelt’s Top 10 list is similar to February’s detections, however March saw the additions of INF.Autorun (v) and BehavesLike.Win32.Malware (v) appearing in the fifth and sixth spots and Trojan.Win32.Agent and Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen (v) dropped off the list.

Other detections with a significant change in March include Exploit.PDF-JS.Gen (v), which saw its percentage of total detections grow by almost 50 percent, and Trojan.Win32.Generic.pak!cobra – which saw a significant drop in its share from 3.37 percent to 1.37 percent of all detections.