IBM: Malware getting more sophisticated

This year has seen a sizable increase in the amount and sophistication of malware being disseminated around the internet, according to IBM's security research team, X-Force.

So this year far the team has identified 210,000 examples of malware, more already than in all of 2006. The most http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifpopular category of malware in 2007 has been Trojans, accounting for 28 percent of all malware detected. In 2006 it was Downloaders that were the most popular form of malware.

Kris Lamb, director of X-Force, said: "The X-Force security statistics report for 2006 predicted a continued rise in the sophistication of targeted, profit-motivated cyber attacks. "This directly correlates to the rise in popularity of Trojans that we are witnessing this year, as Trojans are often used by attackers to launch sustained, targeted attacks." However, X-Force also found that vulnerabilities have actually gone down so far this year, the first time that vulnerabilities have lessened in the first half of a year. Meanwhile, research published in PLoS Medicine states that at least one-third of all spam is touting health products.

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