China Tech News reports:

Jiangmin, one of the largest anti-virus software providers in China, has published its annual computer virus epidemic report and top ten virus rank for 2007, which shows that the company blocked more than 363,000 kinds of new computer viruses in 2007 when an accumulative 34,414,793 computers were attacked.

They spot a disturbing trend:

Jiangmin says that the computer viruses grew slowly in the first half of 2007, but increased dramatically in the second half of the year. The company says that of all the new viruses it blocked in the year, about two-thirds were captured in the second half of the year.

Malicious software (malware) is getting easier to write. Indeed, in some cases no coding is required. There are malware-building tools no more complicated than an Excel macro. We are watching the popularization of virus creation and dissemination.

One point: China Tech News titled the article Video Viruses Create Peril For Chinese Internet Users. I haven’t read the report, but video files such as .avi’s, youtube, etc. have yet to be used as vectors for virus infection. Rather it’s the eCards that go out for holidays that are used for malware distribution.

There are exploits out there that will use Real Player to redirect a user to a website that may infect them, but videos themselves don’t have viruses. At least not yet.

Further reading
The Jiangmin announcement.

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