Russian security giant Kaspersky Lab, publisher of the well-regarded Kaspersky Internet Security 2009, on Wednesday released its mid-year report on the current trends of malware along with a report on trends in spam.

The full two-part report is quite long, here are some of the high points.
New categories of malware

Kaspersky malware threats divided into two main groups active, TrojWare and VirWare. VirWare refers to viruses, worms and malicious software that can spread independently. TrojWare includes backdoors, rootkits, Trojans, and any malware that spreads only if you can trick a user into its launch. The average consumer may fear the virus, but 92 per cent of the threats found by Kaspersky TrojWare fall in the category.

Researchers from Kaspersky Lab more breaking behavior in those categories. Based on analysis of the threats found in the first half of this year, the company introduced several new categories of malware. One of them, Trojan-Ransom, is "to encrypt the user's files in order to demand money from the user to change the files being restored," according to Kaspersky. Another, Trojan-GameThief, steals login credentials for specific popular online games. It is not a serious threat? A World of Warcraft player who spent months creating a character and accumulating loot online surely agree.

Kaspersky also reported a change in the direction of the emerging class of mobile malware. "Instead of attacking smart phones, ... virus writers began to specialize in programs for J2ME Troy, which are capable of running in almost any mobile phone."

The 150-odd threats of this kind directly to steal the user by sending SMS messages to premium-rate numbers. These threats are primitive at the moment but still effective. Kaspersky provides "an increase in the number of malicious programs with Trojan-SMS behavior."

Spam vs. Spam

In the face spam, the spammers are devising new techniques to thwart community-based antispam products such as Cloudmark Desktop, iHateSpam, and SPAMfighter Standard. These products are based on the fact that identical spam messages are sent to thousands or millions of recipients. When members of the community enough to flag messages as spam filters the product out to all other members.

To determine whether a message is a message of known spam, the product boil the contents of the message to a checksum and submits it to the product of the antispam database. Spammers are now insert text at random so that each user receives a slightly different message. Among their techniques are not valid HTML tags, labels reviews, and randomly UTF-8 character encoding. None of these shows, so that all recipients see the same message. However, the community-based anti-spam filter every message is unique.

Of course there is much more in these reports. The report of the trends of malware alone contains more than 9000 words and dozens of letters. If you are interested in further reading, Kaspersky has placed malware trends and spam trends reports online.