Portable storage media increasingly a focus of attack for malware writers 
(04/07/2007)
ESET has announced that for a third consecutive month, Trojan Ani.Gen with nearly 4% of detections, remains the number one threat during June, as observed by ESET's ThreatSense.Net statistical reporting. But the rise of other threats such as Rjump.A into third place and INF/Autorun into fifth, both of which exploit the wide use of portable storage media, shows that this is increasingly a focus of attack for malware writers.
"Despite the fact that web based threats still make up the majority of the top ten threats detected during June, the growing popularity of portable storage devices has not gone unnoticed by malware writers," comments Paul Brook, Managing Director of ESET UK. "USB might have helped the device and gadget markets explode, but in doing so it has also provided easy pickings for malware writers to attack using multiple vectors."
Up from fifth place in May to third in June, Win32/Rjump.A accounted for 2.26% of all threats detected last month. Rjump is a backdoor trojan that is able to propagate as a worm making copies of itself in external devices, like pen drives, memories of digital cameras, etc.
INF/Autorun went straight in at fifth place. This label is used to describe a variety of malware that use the file autorun.inf. The file autorun.inf contains information on programs to run automatically when media is inserted into a computer. Viruses that install or modify autorun.inf files are detected as INF/Autorun by ESET NOD32. Malware that spreads on USB sticks is frequently detected as INF/Autorun.
Top 10 Threats for June 2007:
1 Win32/TrojanDownloader.Ani.Gen - 3.95%
2 Win32/BHO.G- 2.41%
3 Win32/Rjump.A - 2.26%
4 Win32/Spy.VBStat.J - 1.99%
5 INF/Autorun - 1.83%
6 Win32/Pacex.Gen - 1.56%
7 Win32/Adware.Virtumonde - 1.47%
8 Win32/Netsky.Q - 1.22%
9 Win32/PSW.QQRob - 1.00%
10 Win32/Rootkit.Vanti.EE - 0.88%
Related topics: Computer and PC Security Mobile and Wireless Security Virus, Worm, Email security, spyware and malware
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