Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management systems, has published its latest half-year report Kaspersky Security Bulletin, January-June 2007
Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management systems, has published its latest half-year report Kaspersky Security Bulletin, January-June 2007 devoted to malware, spam and malicious website evolution during the first half of 2007.
In the first chapter of the report, Malware Evolution: January-June 2007, Alexander Gostev, a senior virus analyst at Kaspersky Lab, discusses trends in malicious programs in 2007, including the increased use of certain malicious programs by cyber criminals, and presents statistics on malware for a range of operating systems.
The article describes several important current trends, noting in particular that a large number of attacks currently target a variety of banking and payment systems and users of online games. He also explores the relationship between the authors of malicious programAs and spammers, whose common goal is to create a large number of botnets.
The second chapter, Spam Evolution: January-June 2007, is written by Anna Vlasova, the head of Kaspersky Lab spam analysts, and describes the principal trends in the evolution of spam technologies in the first half of the year. The article notes that in 2007, spammers returned to experimenting with new ways of using graphical and animated spam. Another new tactic observed by Kaspersky Lab spam analysts is the use of .pdf and .fdf format attachments to emails.
In the third chapter of Kaspersky Security Bulletin (Malicious Website Evolution: January-June 2007) Costin Raiu, head of research and development at Kaspersky Lab Romania, analyzes technologies used by cybercriminals to infect websites and the computers of users who visit them. The author provides detailed statistics on different malicious programs distributed via web pages. According to Costin Raiu, the two methods most commonly used to distribute malware in this way are social engineering techniques and browser exploits.
The full report can be found at www.viruslist.com
