Trojans, Backdoors and Droppers are 3 top malware globally

The three top malware that are infiltrating enterprises and individuals globally are Trojans, Backdoors and Droppers, a new report said on Friday.

In most cases, submitted hashes or suspicious uploaded files turned out to be Trojans (25 per cent of requests), Backdoors, malware that gives an attacker remote control over a computer ((24 per cent) and Trojan-Droppers (23 per cent) that install other malicious objects.

The statistics also show that the types of malware that researchers most frequently investigate do not coincide with the most widespread ones.

"We have noticed that the number of free requests to the Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Portal to check viruses, or pieces of code that insert themselves in over other programs, is extremely low – less than one percent, but it is traditionally among the most widespread threats detected by endpoint solutions," explained Denis Parinov, Acting Head of Threats Monitoring and Heuristic Detection.

"As we can see, viruses are rarely of interest to researchers, most likely because they lack novelty compared to other threats," he said in a statement.

To develop response and remediation measures, security analysts need to identify the target of attack, the origin of a malicious object, its popularity, etc.

Trojans are usually the most widespread type of malware.

However, Backdoors and Trojan-Droppers are not as common – they only make up 7 per cent and 3 per cent of all malicious files blocked by the Kaspersky endpoint products.

"This difference can be explained by the fact that researchers are often interested in the final target of the attack, while endpoint protection products are seeking to prevent it at an early stage," said the researchers.

For example, they don't allow an end user to open a malicious email or follow a malicious link, preventing backdoors from reaching the user's computer.

On top of that though, security researchers need to identify all the components inside the dropper, the report said.