Adobe products are currently the primary target for hackers and virus writers worldwide due to their prevalence and multi-platform capabilities, Kaspersky Lab malware report found.
Among the many varieties of exploit that were detected, the Exploit.Win32.Pdfka family with 42.97% was by far the most popular. This exploit takes advantages of vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat.
When added together, two families of exploits targeting Adobe products, Exploit.Win32.Pdfka and Exploit.Win32.Pidief, account for a total of 47.5%, or nearly half of all detected exploits. These exploits are PDF documents containing Javascr'+'ipt scenarios that, without the user’s knowledge or consent, download and launch other pieces of malware direct from the Internet.
In the same report, Kaspersky Lab reveals a 25% increase in the number of cyber attacks in Q1 2010, compared to the same period of last year, to a total of 327 million attempts to infect users’ computers.
The reason for the rapid increase in cybercriminal market, is given by the growing penetration rate of the Internet coupled with the inefficient legislation and increase in unemployment.
The first three months of the year had seen 119 million malicious host servers identified, of which 27.57% were located in USA, 22.59% in Russia and merely 12.84% in China. The situation is completely different from 2009 when 32.8% of the malicious servers originated in China, 25.03% in the United States, 11.73% in the Netherlands and 7.97% in Russia.
In recent years, China has become a veritable malware factory, churning out huge amounts of malicious code. The reason behind the country's drop is the “introduction by the Chinese authorities of an interesting New Year's ‘gift’ to the cybercriminals” namely the tightening of policy regarding the registration of Internet addresses using the Chine
