The amount of distinctive malware tracked by security vendor Fortinet, reached an all-time high in January.
Its distinct malware volume soared to over nine,000 last month, over twice that in December, the corporate said during a statement Wednesday. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Fortinet collects knowledge from its FortiGate network security appliances and intelligence systems located globally, and compiles monthly threat statistics from the information.
Topping the charts were variants of Bredolab, accounting for over forty p.c of all malware activity. The Bredolab downloader program, that has assumed the No. one position since November 2009, has been related to the Gumblar attacks, said Fortinet.
Also highlighted within the report was the wave of attacks called Operation Aurora–a major talking purpose following Google’s threat last month to tug out of China. Fortinet said the attack, that uses a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft’s net Explorer browser, was ranked No. four on the list of prime ten attacks for January.
The peak volume of threat activity last month signaled that 2010 can doubtless be “another action-packed year”, Derek Manky, Fortinet’s project manager for cybersecurity and threat analysis, said within the statement.
“The quantity of malicious code within the wild is increasing…while in-the-wild exploits and rising zero-day attacks targeting very fashionable software, like Microsoft IE and Adobe PDF, produce a vulnerable surroundings for users at each purpose of connectivity,” he noted. “As the financial gains of those threats still prove [valuable] to the criminals making them, we’ll solely still see new and artistic attacks take kind.”