Viruses/Worms News

Spam and malware surge on botnet growth

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Fourteen million PCs were compromised by malware in the second quarter, joining the ranks of botnets and contributing to a surge in the distribution of spam and malware to their highest levels ever, according to a quarterly report from web security firm McAfee.

The surge in botnet activity pushed spam email volume up to 92 percent of all emails. McAfee said 150,000 new computers were infected by malware each day, or 20 percent of PCs bought daily.

Botnets, networks of "zombie" PCs that have been taken over by malicious programs, can be used by cybercriminals to launch cyberattacks of the type that brought down government websites in the U.S. and South Korea earlier this month.

South Korea saw a 45 percent increase in new infected computers over the last quarter, as PCs were hijacked to launch the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cyberattacks on the U.S. and South Korea.

"The jump in bot and spam activity we saw in the last three months is alarming," said Mike Gallagher, CTO of McAfee Avert Labs, who added that Auto-Run malware distributed on USB devices has also surged in recent months.

As the number of bots continues to grow, malware writers have begun to offer malicious software as a service to those who control botnets. Zeus - an automated Trojan creation tool - has made malware distribution even easier, McAfee said.