Computer virus infections were up sharply this month around worldwide, with anti-virus software developer Trend Micro posting advisories for 21 new types of malware to 27 June, up from 14 in May and eight in April.
Andrew Gordon, enterprise senior pre-sales engineer, northern region, at Trend Micro Australia, said Australia was experiencing the flow-on effects of a global increase in malware attacks increasingly targeting back-door, network and Web-based vulnerabilities.
"There's definitely a lot more hacker-type activity as opposed to specific virus-writing activity," Gordon said. "We're probably seeing a move away from the more dastardly-type viruses, but when you think about what these [recent] threats are doing--such as opening up one machine to anything--if you've got a laptop with sensitive information on it there's a lot of concern."
Malware now being released increasingly threatened businesses and corporate networks rather than home users, Gordon said. Several trojans and other hacker tools that could enable criminals to steal confidential information or take control of a network appeared in the list of new, mainly low-risk, threats.
According to Trend Micro, one hacker-type tool that appeared this month was Worm_Mumu.A, which uses weak administrator passwords to attack open shared directories. However, the most common way worms and viruses propagate is through infected email attachments, for example by using peer-to-peer file sharing or instant messaging to spread through network drives.
News source: iTnews - Hack attacks multiply in June
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