Threats to surge in 2008

The first quarter of 2008 has come to an end and security vendors have released their post-analysis of the quarter’s threat activities. For the most part the illusive Storm botnet has come out of hibernation and wreaked havoc once again.

Messaging security vendor MessageLabs revealed in its Intelligence Report for March 2008 that the Storm botnet was responsible for 20 percent of all spam in the first quarter of the year. According to the vendor, the surge was fuelled by typical spam messages selling male enlargement drugs which accounted for 41 percent of its efforts. But that wasn’t all. MessageLabs said it intercepted more than four million emails from the Storm botnet since January containing links to malware or aimed at launching phishing attacks.

“Storm celebrated its first birthday at the start of the year and commemorated the anniversary with a significant run of nostalgic spam. More than 78 percent of the spam it spewed out this quarter was either focused on male enlargement drugs, replica watches or spam of a sexual nature,” said Mark Sunner, chief security analyst, MessageLabs.

“Storm’s focus on spam seems to be just the tip of the iceberg as emails containing malware and phishing attacks from the Storm botnet are now growing in numbers.”

Romanian security vendor BitDefender said the massive resurgence of the Storm worm Trojan dominated its March 2008 Top Ten Malware list. Researchers from the vendor’s labs revealed that variants of the Storm Trojan accounted for more than half of the total malware detected in March alone.

Security vendor Proofpoint claimed that overall worldwide spam volumes surged by 50 percent in the first quarter of 2008 and enterprise will see inbound spam more than double this year.

“Botnets continue to proliferate and are by far the dominant source of spam,” said Gerry Tucker, regional head for Proofpoint in APAC.

Meanwhile, Finnish security vendor F-Secure saw it fit to highlight the first mobile ransom Trojan targeting smartphones as an emerging threat for the first quarter of 2008. Detected in China, the Kiazha Trojan infected smartphones by downloading a shareware lookalike program which then dropped several known older viruses on the phone. It then sent a message that advised recipients to transfer the equivalent of seven dollars to the attackers through an online payment system.

2008 is a historic year for mobile threats as figures have revealed more smartphones will be shipped in 2008 than PCs, according to statistics compiled by Jari Heinonen, vice president at F-Secure APAC, from various analyst firms. He said smartphones will be virus writers’ next wave of attack.

“It’s now interesting enough for virus writers as the devices are fully featured and there are plenty of ‘do it yourself’ kits out there that make it simple and easy,” he stated.

To make matters more dire, Microsoft’s newly announced Windows Mobile 6.1, which will have a dedicated mobile version of Internet Explorer, may well be the catalyst for mobile malware surge.

Commenting on the release, Heinonen said: “when volumes of Windows Mobile grow so will the threats.”

2008 in security surge threats to