Security firm Sourcefire has published its latest report on malware threats and says that the “analysis highlighted interesting comparisons between the United States and the UK”.

According to the report, the biggest threat in both countries is a search bar which “displays unwanted advertisements and dramatically slows PCs down.”

The web search bar makes computers especially slow when browsing and tracks online behaviour, potentially compromising privacy.

Search engine results are also “hijacked” by the bar, which could lead to users landing on malicious pages.

Sourcefire says that at the moment “only about a third of the major anti-malware vendors can detect this threat”, meaning many users are infected without being aware, even if they have AV software installed.

The company say that they use a “collective intelligence [...] to provide a collaborative approach to end security.”

Their research found that Russia and India are the countries whose PC users have the highest rate of infection. The US was in fourth place with 0.43 infections per active user.

This means that out of every 100 users, 43 were found to have malware on their machine, almost half of all PC owners in the US.

UK users were just behind the US in fifth place with 0.39 infections per user and Japan was found to be the country with the least.

However, it was discovered that US users have a lot more software installed on their machines in general and it is a “richer variety of legitimate software”.

This means that although UK users become infected slightly less often than their US counterparts, a larger portion of queried files are malicious.

The research uncovered this by measuring “benign-to-malicious query ratio” for users in both countries and found that people in the US install a lot of different applications such as games.

“Today’s threats are quick-changing and very targeted,” said Dominic Storey, Sourcefire’s EMEA Technical Director. “Sourcefire sees tens of thousands of malware variants each day and 75 percent of these are seen only on a single endpoint.”

“It’s critical that consumers and enterprises alike consider endpoint security solutions that are intelligent, adaptive and can quickly analyse threat data and turn that into dynamic protection.”

Search bars are quite often nothing more than spyware and it is recommended that PC users should install an antivirus solution that includes protection against this.

Alternatively, install a standalone anti-spyware solution such as Spybot or Adaware, both of which provide a free version for home use.

(News Republic)

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