The persistence of Trojan attacks and scareware

GFI announced the top 10 most prevalent malware threats for the month of September 2010.

Statistics show a staggeringly consistent attack primarily by the same Trojan horse programs that have persisted for several months. Several of the top threats were unchanged from the past two months.

Trojans detected as Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT were still the chief detection, slightly down to 23.54 percent of total detections. This generic detection includes more than 120,000 traces of malicious applications and has been in the top spot for many months: in August, with 25.11 percent, in July with 29.08 percent and in June with 27.16 percent of the total detections.

The number two detection has not changed rankings from last month either. Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen is a detection of password-stealing Trojans with many versions. The third largest detection, Trojan.Win32.Generic!SB.0, moved up from fifth place last month and is the generic detection for password-stealing Trojan horse programs. These install key loggers which record keystrokes and send the data to the malicious operators who distribute the malware.

The top 10 most prevalent malware threats for the month of September are:

1. Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT 23.54%
2. Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen 4.27%
3. Trojan.Win32.Generic!SB.0 4.06%
4. Trojan.Win32.Generic.pak!cobra 3.04%
5. INF.Autorun (v) 2.3%
6. Worm.Win32.Downad.Gen (v) 1.44%
7. Trojan.HTML.FakeAlert.e (v) 1.09%
8. PlaySushi 1.08%
9. FraudTool.Win32.FakeAV.gen!droppedData (v) 0.91%
10. Trojan.Win32.Malware.a 0.83%