China Tech News reports:

According to a report released by Kingsoft, in the first half of 2008, the company intercepted 1.24 million new computer viruses and trojans.

This number increase by 338% compared with the total number in 2007 and it is more than the total virus number of the recent five years.

The report says that in the first half of 2008, the number of trojans maintained a rapid growth. Apart from the continuous emergence of new viruses, some old viruses also became active with the help of downloaded viruses. At the same time, the contest between viruses and security software became serious. Some stubborn viruses such as Robot Dog, DiskGen and Auto trojans have become great threatens to the security of computers across China.

From the statistics of the first half of 2008, six out of the top ten viruses are downloader viruses. Kingsoft says that these downloader viruses bring a large number of trojans and screen the security software before downloading these trojans. Therefore, even some old trojans that can be killed by some anti-virus software will still be able to safely steal sensitive information from computer users.

Malware classification is typically grouped into families, usually the first instance of a new virus (based on how it was coded and what it may do). They are then further distinguished as variants (tweaks and changes in code and/or functionality). See BitDefender for a run down on their naming convention.

I haven’t seen the report (and as it’s probably in Chinese I couldn’t read it anyways), so I’m not sure if the 1.24 million new viruses are all new families, but I doubt it. More likely it includes all the different variants.

One possible cause for this is the rise of DIY malware kits. F-Secure had a great post back in January about a trojan building tool called Hupigon. It allows you to select all sorts of different features and build a nice little trojan all your own.

There was a burst of phishing attacks related to the Sichuan earthquake as hackers tried to exploit curiosity and sympathy for a natural disaster to infect computers. A similar spike is expected for the Olympics.

Expect an even larger number in the next report.

'); //-->

ShareThis