Fortinet releases monthly threat report

Seven high-severity exploit attempts and one that rates as critical -- that would be Conficker, of course -- made the March Threatscape Report from Fortinet, the Top of the Pops for the rightfully unpopular, released Friday. No new malware variants made the list, compiled between February 21 and March 20. Malware infection attempts made up the lion's share of threatening traffic, with spyware and phishing attempts together making up less than a third of attempts.

Despite the looming threat posed by the Conficker exploit (which accounted for 2% of all exploit attempts reported by Fortinet during the month), the most active malware around is actually Virut.A, a squirrelly two-year-old that's held down spots in the Top 5 for a full year now and ascends to #1 this month, with a huge burst of speed in early March and just before St. Patrick's Day. Virut.a infects .exe and .scr files, attaching its encrypted code to the files and attempting to sneak out via port 65520 to connect to a bot-involved IRC server in Poland.