Jordan on the virus map!

Kaspersky Lab, the well-known anti-virus company, has published a report which reveals that a total of 17 per cent of Jordan’s computers were infiltrated by a variant of the Kido malware.

To quote the statement, “Kido has been mostly successful in Jordan at wreaking havoc in large corporation networks, due to its advanced network worm replication functions, that make it a nightmare for system administrators,” said Costin Raiu, Senior Anti Virus Expert, Head of Kaspersky EEMEA Virus Lab.
Well, although I have not heard complaints, and though one has to understand that such statements are motivated by selling more anti-virus products, we need to take a look at this alarming percentage!

The Kaspersky official goes on to say that Kido has been active in other Middle Eastern countries as well, and the most successful variant is Kido.ih.
What is surprising is that, according to Kaspersky, Kido’s authors have stopped active development of this family of malware, which makes this variant the last available, yet it continues to spread in Jordan!

What does that say about how up-to-date our software security is?

Kaspersky says “It is still spreading in the wild and causing problems for users,” which means Jordan is truly in the ‘wild and untamed’ virus zone.

And that’s not all, the malware report for Jordan also shows a proliferation of Sality, a virus that affects 14.32 per cent of all the country’s affected systems. This malware mainly attacks home PC users. It is passed through infected software, or it piggybacks on other malware. This makes its detection more difficult. It also has worm capabilities, which means it can spread through networks, by copying itself to other computers directly, taking advantage of the Windows Autorun feature.

Because of all these things, Sality is not only hard to catch once it infects a system, but also hard to disinfect.

The bad news does not stop there. Other malware affecting Jordanian users includes Mabezat, infecting 8.84 per cent of computers. It’s a tricky worm which operates by attaching itself to executables, while being polymorphic and spreading through network drives.

The report, which also covers other countries, is based on a study during December 2009.

The question is what kind of results would we be getting in a study of February 2010. Would it be better or worse?

Do enough people care to check their systems and update their anti-virus? They should. Let’s each start with ourselves, and maybe the frightening statistics above will drop.

zanasser@gmail.com