Top source of malware seems to be China
April 14, 2010 Computer Safety Tip
These days malware and all things malice are really taking over the internet world, and it seems that not only is its 
prevalence on the increase, but rapidly so.
Recently, a Security news portal, Symantec, released a survey they conducted, revealing the top sources of all malware across the internet world.
As is mentioned by the senior analyst at Symantec, Paul Wood: “When considering the true location of the sender rather than the location of the email server, fewer attacks are actually sent from North America than it would at first seem. A large proportion of targeted attacks are sent from legitimate webmail accounts which are located in the US and therefore, the IP address of the sending mail server is not a useful indicator of the true origin of the attack.”
It appears that analyzing the source of malware based on the mail servers does not in fact tell the full picture, as the sender can use any Web-based e-mail account in order to send out malware.
“By checking the actual sender’s IP address found in the e-mail’s header, we found individuals in China responsible for 28.2 percent of malware, Romania for 21.1 percent, and the U.S. for 13.8 percent. Overall, the analysis discovered that most of the attacks coming from mail services in North American actually stem from other regions, including Asia, Europe, and Africa.” – as is mentioned by Symantec’s Paul Wood.
It has also been discovered, in lieu of the latest analysis results, that malware makers are targeting specific job titles now as well, for example: “The five leading titles hit by malware now include director, senior official, vice president, manager, and executive director. The people receiving a higher number of attacks are typically in charge of foreign trade and defense policy, especially related to Asian countries”
One needs to also be aware of the forms these type malware applications tend to take, this way you will be able to eradicate any presence of said malware. As is mentioned in Symantec’s report,
“E-mail file attachments hiding malware continue to be a popular method of attack. The most common types of files found in such e-mails were .xls (Microsoft Excel) and .doc (Microsoft Word) documents. Along with .zip and .pdf files, these four accounted for 50 percent of the files attached to malicious messages this month.
But people should also be wary of receiving encrypted .rar files (a method of compressing files) through e-mail. Though these types of files make up only a small percent of malicious e-mail attachments, Symantec found them to be hosts for malware 96.8 percent of the time.”
