USB worms have taken the No. 1 spot for top malware in the world, according to a McAfee threat report, released Tuesday.
In addition, the "McAfee Threats Report, First Quarter 2010" indicated a trend of diploma spam coming from China and other Asian countries, while spammers are continuing to exploit high-profile news events, such as the Haiti earthquake, by poisoning search engines. Finally, the report found that U.S.-based servers continue to host the majority of malicious URLs.
Threats on portable storage devices rose to the top of the list as the most popular malware, evident by a rash of AutoRun infections that held the No. 1 and No. 3 spots for top five malware over the last quarter.
Security experts contend that attacks delivered via portable storage devices have experienced a revival in recent months, after being dormant for an extensive period of time.
"It's kind of like your old-school style of malware, one device to another device" said Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager for McAfee Labs. "Those were dead for the longest period of time."
Password-stealing Trojans rounded out the top five malware following portable storage-based attacks, which included generic downloaders, unwanted programs and gaming software that anonymously collects statistics, according to the report. All of the top five threats remained consistently popular worldwide.
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