February's biggest IT threats named

Fortinet has released a report which names the most dangerous IT threats detected last month.

The statistics were compiled from Fortinet's FortiGate network security systems for the period January 21st to February 20th, 2010.

The firm says that one of the most widely detected threats was a ‘ransomware attack’, where access to applications on your PC is disabled until you pay for a "security tool" to clean the computer. This form of attack grew on the back of large spam campaigns.

“Apart from ransomware, our malware top ten this period was riddled with many other active threats including, in second place, the Buzus spam trojan, followed in respective order by the Bredolab, Gumblar and Sasfis botnets,” said Fortinet. “This is further emphasised in our attack top ten list, with Gumblar.Botnet traffic taking position as our number one detected malicious network chatter.”

Other points of interest from the report included word on a new spam network being established using the Cutwail engine and the detection of criminals using a vulnerability in Java, which “allows computers to be taken over simply by visiting a web page”.