The number of new malicious programs in 2006 rose by 41 per cent on the previous year’s figures, according to vendor Kasperksy Lab's annual report.
The number of Trojans analysed by the Kaspersky Lab in 2006 far outweighed the number of worms, continuing the trend from previous years.
'New families of Trojans and variants accounted for 90 per cent of all new malware last year. This is attributable to the fact they are relatively easy to write and can be used to steal information, create botnets and execute mass spam mailings,' said Alex Gostev, senior virus analyst at Kaspersky Lab.
In 2006, there was a clear increase in malicious programs for areas previously thought to be relatively secure, such as online games and social networking sites.
Due to the lack of critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows system services, hackers and other malicious users turned their attention to other popular software products according to the report.
'Word, Excel and PowerPoint all fell victim to blackhat attacks,' said Gostev. 'In the course of the year, the number of vulnerabilities amounted to more than two dozen, and all of them were made public before Microsoft released a patch to fix the relevant vulnerability.'
The report says malicious users took a major step in 2006 when they started encrypting user files in order to extort money from victims. In 2005, such programs had limited functionality because of the use of primitive DIY encryption algorithms. In 2006, however, these programs employed professional cryptographic algorithms, such as RSA, which are considered to be one of the most secure.
Another significant event was the appearance of the first ‘real’ viruses and worms for MacOS, as well as Trojans for the J2ME [Java Micro Edition] mobile platform. The latter were designed to steal money from mobile users’ accounts.
2006 also passed without a global epidemic on the scale of those seen in 2005, such as Mytob. 2006 recorded seven major virus epidemics – half the number recorded in the previous year – and none of them on the level of the global epidemics seen a few years ago.
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