Online Gaming Looks East to West for Strong Gains on Fortinet’s Most-Reported Threats for June 2008

Gaming Trojans, Adware and Parasitic File Infectors Lead Month’s Malware Activity

MALAYSIA, 8 July 2008 – Fortinet - the pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions - today announced the top 10 most reported high-risk threats for June 2008. After slightly losing ground in May from an April strike, online gaming campaigns rebounded in June and expanded their targets from the Far East to Europe and the Americas, with concentrated attacks on Turkey (15.4%) and the U.S. (7.4%). Asian attacks targeted China (36.5%), Taiwan (31.1%) and Japan (4.3%). As individual threats, the most active online gaming Trojans took the second and fourth positions on Fortinet’s Top Ten list. As a unit, the gaming brethrens were the most active malware family, making up more than 35 percent of total threats for the month.

“It’s no surprise to see malicious online gaming activity circle the globe to cast a bigger net for financial gain,” said Derek Manky, security researcher for Fortinet. “With the online gaming market thriving with consumers, malicious activity will very likely continue for some time in this emerging sector as it forms a viable target.”

Fortinet’s FortiGuard Global Security Research Team compiled this report based on intelligence gathered from FortiGate multi-threat security systems in production worldwide. Customers who use Fortinet’s FortiGuard Subscription Services are already protected against the threats outlined in this report.

Additional malware trends observed during this period include the following:
While dropping five positions from second place in May, adware Vapsup keeps its presence in the Top Ten;

Parasitic file infector Virut.A strengthens, landing in third position and remaining in the top five for five months running, with the strongest activity in Japan and Korea;

Grew.A reappears in the Top Ten for the first time since February 2008, remaining on the Top 15 list for more than 10 months.

Following are the Top Ten individual threats and Top Five threat families in June. Top 100 shifts indicate positional changes compared to May’s Top 100 ranking, with “new” representing the malware’s debut in the Top 100.

To read the full June report, please visit: http://www.fortiguardcenter.com/reports/roundup_jun_2008.html.