McAfee Threats Report Released for First Quarter 2010

Today we released the McAfee Threats Report for the First Quarter 2010. In it we reveal that USB worms have taken the No. 1 spot for malware worldwide! Spam trends show that email subjects vary greatly from country to country with diploma spam, out of China and other Asian countries, on the rise. Disasters, earthquake reports and other major 2010 news events drive poisoned web searches, and U.S.-based servers host the majority of new, malicious URLs.
Some highlights from the report:
It may surprise many that threats on portable storage devices took the lead for the most popular malware. AutoRun related infections held not only the No. 1 position but also the No. 3 spots due to the widespread adoption of removable devices, mainly USB drives. A variety of password-stealing Trojans rounded out the top five. Those include generic downloaders, unwanted programs and gaming software that collects statistics anonymously. Unlike past studies, the popularity of these threats ranked consistently worldwide.
While spam rates remain steady, their subjects vary considerably from country to country. One of this quarter’s biggest discoveries was that China, South Korea and Vietnam have the most significant diploma spam, which promotes the purchase of forged documents to establish qualifications for jobs. Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan have exceptional rates for Delivery Status Notification spam indicating a possible issue with preventative mail-filtering capabilities.
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