Virut variant and Storm Worm dominate malware statistics in March

The March threatscape report from Fortinet revealed that having stayed in Fortinet's top ten active malware list for 12 months, it was most active in March. Derek Manky, security researcher at Fortinet, claimed that it had generated enough activity to be recognised, as its unique capability to propagate through other worms in a hybrid form has seen it stay present.

Elsewhere, 30 new vulnerabilities were rated as ‘critical', up from five in the previous month. Manky claimed that although active exploitation of these has been low, critical vulnerabilities are highly sought in the digital underground and typically have long life spans, so it may take some time before successful exploits rise.

Meanwhile the amount of pornographic sites blocked rose to 65.2 per cent of all blocked traffic, while malware accounted for 24 per cent of blocked sites and phishing only 1.7 per cent. However following a huge spike in December, pornography traffic slowly declined to a standard level in March.

Finally the top ten exploits and intrusion prevention saw the Storm Worm account for 62.6 per cent of all attacks reported. This was rated as a ‘high' risk; the only ‘critical' vulnerability was the MS.DCERPC.NETAPI32.Buffer.Overflow, which accounted for only two per cent of reported attacks.

See original article on scmagazineuk.com