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31 July 2004

Trojan of the Month

It's becoming increasingly clear that the Internet is turning into a place where quantity is worth a lot more than quality, even when speaking about malware.

The golden age of super-viruses which were making their way to the pole position in a matter of days is gradually coming to an end. Surprisingly or not, mass mailers are no longer the heroes, as their permanent presence on the red carpet may has stirred some attention and people seem nowadays to be more reluctant with regard to the contents of their mailboxes. This leaves a broad path for smaller pests, such as trojans, backdoors and bots,
as was also seen last month.

The July Evil Top Ten is by far overwhelmed by adware and spyware, more specifically, anonymous scripts based on exploits. Their only merit lies within their outstanding numbers.

A quick look at the forth runner-up, Adware.1088, reveals that, after hanging on to the first position for quite a while, it had to step down in order to make room for a somewhat little-known trojan, tastelessly named KeenValue. Consequently, the first three medals go to the same household, for the three different versions of the same trojan.

On the other hand, the previous issue of Evil Top Ten included a completely unremarkable trojan, SDBot, which also has countless versions; this IRC bot is still present in the July list, as a result of a faceless army of script kiddies who are supporting its cause worldwide.

Hold your congrats, though. All these mediocre programs are spreading mostly through exploits. In other words: lots of people are awarded with such delightful malware just by downloading weirdly-named software of their choice, or by browsing some obscure webpages. An equally important thing, which should not be forgotten, since it gives the most annoying headaches: applying patches. This is a boring business and, admittedly, it's also pretty dull to go through the same lecture over and over again, nevertheless it is highly necessary if you want to avoid any extra nuisances.

So here it is, the July virus top ten from BitDefender, in an eye-friendly
format:

1. Trojan.Downloader.Keenval.E
2. Trojan.Downloader.KeenValue.A
3. Trojan.Downloader.KeenValue.C
4. Adware.1088
5. Trojan.Spy.BiSpy.C
6. Backdoor.SDBot.gen
7. Adware.Gator.A
8. Adware.Serchentrix.A
9. Trojan.Downloader.Agent.AE
10. Trojan.Clicker.Delf.R

BitDefender products can successfully address any problems created by such
malware. Commercial versions of BitDefender start from USD 29.99 and are
available for 30-days free evaluation from www.bitdefender.com.

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