Most threats detected in May were related to financially motivated cyber-crime

Trojans and adware were responsible for 49.8 percent of all infections detected by Panda ActiveScan in May. Specifically, Trojans were the culprits of 26.14 percent of attacks, while adware (a type of malware designed to display advertisements) reached 23.7 percent.

Last month also witnessed a slight rise in the number of attacks involving bots (3.37%) and spyware (3.03%), both of which are also used for financial gain by cyber-crooks. Similarly, backdoor Trojans accounted for 5.36 percent of all infections.

“The creators of malicious code are now almost entirely focused on spreading types of malware that can bring financial returns and as such we are seeing less of the traditional viruses or worms that were behind previous widescale epidemics,” confirms Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs.

Other types of malware such as worms and dialers accounted for 9.46 percent and 3.74 percent of all infections respectively.

As for May’s malware Top Ten, in first place came MSNPhoto.A, a new MSN Messenger worm In order to spread, it tries to trick users into installing it by using messages alluding to the president of the USA.

KillAV.FW, a Trojan designed to steal confidential information from computers, was in second place, the same position it held the previous month. Brontok.H is still one of the most frequently detected worms, and rose to third place in the ranking in May. The Downloader.NOE Trojan remained in fourth place.

Puce.E, a worm that spreads via P2P networks, moved up one place into fifth. Then came the new Donwloader.NZR Trojan, designed to download other strains of malware onto an infected system.

Sdbot.ftp, the script that worms from this family use to download themselves via FTP has dropped down two places into seventh since the previous month.
The last three places in the list are occupied by three new malicious codes. The Agent.FCA, Dropper.UN and Downloader.OCJ Trojans.