Microsoft Reveals Top Ten Threats Removed By Malware Update
It’s been a while since we’ve done a good top malware threats list here, but . This is a tool that runs every month at Patch Tuesday time, so it has very broad, worldwide reach. The downside to it is that it searches for and removes a list of malware that is small compared to that of a real anti-malware product (well, it’s a lot bigger than , but Microsoft has a bigger problem and perhaps we should give Apple some time).
The top 10 threats removed by the tool:
FamilyThreat CountMachine
CountTaterf544,662463,000
Renos308,789228,973
Alureon249,101211,441
FakeRean219,359162,328
Bancos173,134158,152
Koobface274,769134,139
Frethog140,218132,827
Cutwail166,284110,840
Rustock98,67390,788
Tibs93,17584,081
Off the top of my head I only recognize the names Koobface, Bancos and Renos. Koobface is clearly a major threat, but it gets a lot of attention because its Facebook association makes it a sexy story. How many of you have heard of Taterf? indicates that other vendors, including Symantec and McAfee, use a generic “Trojan” moniker, which perhaps explains the Taterf name’s anonymity.
The top 10 threats were cleaned from a total of 1,776,569 machines. The country data below makes clear that there are a lot of machines not in the top 10 list.
Country/Region Threat CountMachine Count
US, 50,6282,183,166
China, 1,085,140383,378
Brazil, 737,322282,152
UK, 1,078,540278,207
Korea, 601,646262,539
France, 412,115156,566
Taiwan, 236,047140,283
Spain, 328,829133,264
Canada, 433,770119,885
Mexico, 447,841117,845
Originally posted to the security blog, .
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