McAfee’s third quarter security report found an unprecedented spike in new malware pieces floating around the Internet and most of are far more complex and targeted than prior iterations.
As eSecurity Planet reports, the new threats, including Stuxnet and a slew of scams targeting mobile devices and social networks, can cause far more damage and be spread much quicker than garden-variety spam campaigns.
McAfee security researchers said a number of old, familiar malware scams — SQL injections, botnets and socially engineered come-ons — were still posing a significant threat to both consumers and enterprise customers.
In the quarter, McAfee said that 60 percent of the top Google search terms returned malicious sites, often multiple malicious sites, within the first 100 results.
Spam volume fell to its lowest level in two years but malware, be it in infected sites or links embedded inside spam messages, surged to an all-time high in the third quarter, according to security software vendor McAfee’s 3Q Threats Report(PDF format).
Out of the gate, the first number to jump out from the report is the finding that an average of 60,000 new pieces of malware are identified each day, up 400-plus percent since 2007. And this proliferation of sophisticated malware comes at time when total spam messages fell to a two-year low.
