Most popular threats of 2007 according to PandaLabs

17th January 2008

The company PandaLabs has published a report on the most popular threats of 2007, based on statistics collected by free online antivirus ActiveScan. According to this information, the most common cyber-threat of 2007 is the Trojan.
Trojans were the reason of 25.83% of the total number of infections reported in 2007, and made up 77.40% of the total number of new malicious codes appeared last year. Compared to 2006, when the Trojans percentage was only 50% of new malicious codes, this number has risen dramatically. In fact, according to data from PandaLabs, the number of new specimens of this type of malicious code monthly increased fivefold.
The second most active type of malicious code (25.39% of infections identified by ActiveScan) in 2007 is advertising codes. This type also won the second largest number of new types, which made out 11.20% of the total.
The worms have caused 7.99% of the total number of infections last year and composed 9.21% of the total number of new malware. Of all the categories of the malware, worms, compared to 2006, lost their positions most of all, for last year the number of them made out 23.21% of new malware.
As for the major families of malicious codes, by the end of 2007, the main among them was the family of trojan-loaders, used to download malicious codes on computers. In particular, a representative of this family, Downloader .MDW, headed the list of most active samples to the outcome of the last half of 2007.