Microsoft unveils January-June threat report

Security analysis shows rise in vulnerabilities, trojans and scamware.

Microsoft

has released its latest ‘Security Intelligence Report’, covering the first half of 2007, showing a steady increase in reports of software vulnerabilities, ‘potentially unwanted’ applications and trojan activity.

The study found vulnerabilities continuing in an upward trend lasting since 2003, with high-severity flaws rising most of all. The percentage of these flaws that are subject to publicly known exploits has, however, fallen somewhat since 2006. Malware infection rates have risen across the board, with trojans and downloaders continuing to dominate – some trojans families, including W32/Zlob and the notorious Storm attack, used upwards of 20,000 variants between January and June.

Malicious email content is dominated by worms, with phishing attempts close behind, and instant messaging systems have seen a major rise in backdoor attacks, mainly due to numerous W32/IRCbot variants. The

Malicious Software Removal Tool

, provided free to

Windows

users and updated monthly as part of the

Patch Tuesday

security release, removed infections from one in 217 machines, up from one in 409 in 2006, with older and unpatched versions of

Windows

, unsurprisingly, the most common victims. In the ‘potentially unwanted’ world, rogue anti-malware products have become more widespread than ever, with adware levels remaining fairly stable.

A blog entry from

Microsoft

‘s Vinny Gullotto introducing the report is

here

. The full report and summaries of key findings can be found

here

.

Posted on 26 October 2007 by

Virus Bulletin