McAfee Names MyDoom 'Exploit' of the Decade

In a newly published report about the evolution of cybercrime during the past decade, McAfee named the MyDoom worm as the most damaging malware threat.

Dubbed "A Good Decade for Cybercrime," McAfee's report [pdf] looks at how the threat landscape evolved from a battleground of rival hackers seeking notoriety to an underground economy fuelled by a desire for illegal profits.

The company also makes predictions for the future saying that social networking scams and mobile threats are going to increase in prevalence this year.

McAfee begins its "top 5 exploits of the decade" list with the MyDoom worm, which is estimated to have caused damages of $38 billion.

MyDoom appeared in January 2004 and propagated primarily via email attachments. It's primary purpose was to send spam emails and launch DDoS attacks.

"Due to the volume of spam sent, it slowed down global Internet access by 10 percent and reduced access to some websites by 50 percent, causing billions of dollars in lost productivity and online sales," McAfee says in its report.

The second most damaging "exploit" according to the company was the "ILOVEYOU" email worm launched in 2000 which cost companies and government institutions an estimated $15 billion to clean out of their systems.

The third threat on McAfee's list is the 2008 Conficker worm which infected between 9 and 15 million computers and caused damages of $9.1 billion.

Conficker remains among of the most common antivirus detection even today, suggesting that a very large number of computers are still infected with the threat.

Next in McAfee's top is the Stuxnet industrial espionage and sabotage worm which has been in circulation since mid-2009 and affected systems in factories and government facilities. The monetary damage caused by this malware remains unknown.

Finally, the last listed threat is ZeuS (Zbot), an information stealing malware commonly used by cyber fraudsters to steal online banking credentials and sensitive financial information.