Sophos Announces the Most Prevalent Malware Threats During May 2007

Sophos, one of the world leaders in IT security, has announced the most prevalent malware threats that are causing problems for computer users during May 2007 according to their studies. The conclusion is that infected web pages are still posing a threat and are affecting all kinds of sites, official government websites and not only.

An increase of more than 1000 new infected web pages daily has been calculated compared to April. There were 9500 new infected pages daily in May, and 304000 infected webpages in total.

The top ten list of web-based malware threats in May 2007 is still having the iframe in the top position. 65.5 % of the infected web pages were containing this malicious code. Three appending viruses that usually infect HTM, HTML and HTT files are the new entries in this top for this month. A bit surprising is the fact that those viruses are quite old, especially the Soraci virus, which Sophos has provided protection against for more than a year. The other two viruses that can be found in this list are the Redlof and the Roor. Except for these three viruses, there can also be found four trojans in the top, but the fact that iframe continues to dominate the chart in such a clear way is the most important conclusion that may result from Sophos' statistics.
In what concerns the top of the countries that are hosting malware-infected web pages in May 2007, no important changes took place, except for the fact that Thailand has entered this top for the first time and directly at number five. Sophos was surprised to discover that a lot of the infected websites in this country were governmental websites. China is still responsible for hosting more than 50 percent of the infected web pages, especially because of the iframe malware code which is widely reported in this country's webpages.

The conclusion regarding these lists may be drawn from Carole Theriault's (senior security consultant at Sophos) statement - "Attacks spreading on the web are becoming more frequent and more problematic for businesses every month"