News | 04 Nov 2009 :
While globally Conficker is still the prevalent infection, Ireland faces its own cyber dangers. Among Irish PC users, INF/Autorun family of malware, designed to run automatically when removable media, such as often USB flash drives and similar devices are accessed by a Windows PC user, is back to first place among Irish infections, though it remains in second place globally.
This is according to ESET's ThreatSense.Net, a malware reporting and tracking system, for October 2009, such threats beat Conficker into first place here. The appearance of Conficker so high in the threat listing, both here and globally is something of an anomaly, as the Microsoft patch which can prevent the infection has now been available for over a year. Eset says that the continued spread of Conficker shows a worrying lack of unawareness by computer users.
However, even more concerning, according to ESET, is the number two spot, taken by Win32/Kryptik family, which has started to spread massively throughout the last month. ESET uses this label to cover a group of harmful applications, typically rogue antispyware and antivirus programs, and spying Trojans, which are all aimed at extracting money from users.
For more information, see http://eset.ie/threat-center/