2008: Bad Year for Malware

In a recent study that is bound to have PC users across the globe in a panic, 2008 has already been determined as one of the worst years for malware. According to an article in PC World, malware has increased 278 percent just in the first half of 2008.

Scansafe, the researcher of this study, states that most of this increase is due to a large amount of websites that were compromised last month. Walmart, Business Week, Ralph Lauren Home and other large websites were attacked by SQL Injection Attacks in June of 2008 which caused a major scare for businesses worldwide.

According to PC World, “Less than a year ago, web surfers were more at risk from social engineering scams and rogue third-party advertisers, with the outright compromise of legitimate websites being relatively rare, and when they did happen, they were fairly obvious cases such as website defacements.”

The Scansafe Global Threat report studies more than 60 billion websites as well as blocking more than 600 million attacks from January to June of this year. Businesses such as Microsoft and HP are taking a proactive approach with these new SQL attacks are pushing out free tools to PC users worldwide. The study also mentioned that their finding shows malware attacks will only get worse in the months to come.