14 DAY TRIAL // The Internet is not a safe place even for the protected users because the number of threats is increasing every day. Security company Sophos released its monthly report concerning the top threats discovered in May 2007, revealing that China and United States are still the top two countries hosting malware-infected websites. The two nations are followed by Germany with 5.1 percent, Russia with 3.5 percent and Thailand with 1.1 percent. However, the most important rank is the one concerning the threats distributed through emails, the "Hotmail hoax" and the "Olympic torch" being clear leaders with 11.1 percent and 10 percent. The "Bill Gates fortune" malware is placed on the 9th position with 2.0 percent.
"Attacks spreading on the web are becoming more frequent and more problematic for businesses every month. Malicious sites don't need to host malware to be dangerous - we are also seeing and blocking access to 600 new phishing pages each day. It's no longer enough for businesses simply to filter websites based on category - the real nasty attacks are most often found lurking on legitimate web pages. This is a wake up call for organizations with a website: being out of date with patches and running inadequate security has very real risks," said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos.
According to the report, the most popular threat discovered in May 2007 was Mal/IFrame-F with a shocking percentage: 65.5 %, followed by JS/EncIFra with 6.9 percent. This malware threat is actually a HTML file that tries to run malicious programs when the user clicks on them.
The report was also revealing a huge spreading rate of the malicious files because no more than 304.000 websites were flagged as malware pages in May 2004. According to Sophos, approximately 9.500 new infected websites are published every day, in comparison with 8.500 reported in April.