Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - A total of 17 per cent of Jordan’s computers were infiltrated by a variant of the notorious Kido malware, according to the latest malware report of Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions.

“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.

“Kido.ih has been active in other ME countries as well, being one of the most successful variant. It is also one of the last variants, with its authors apparently having stopped the active development of this family of malware. Nevertheless, it is still spreading in the wild and causing problems for users,” he said.

Kaspersky Lab’s malware report for Jordan also shows a proliferation of Sality, a virus that affected 14.32 per cent of all the country’s affected systems in December last year. This malware preferred attacks on home PC users.
“Sality, on the other hand, is most of the time passed through infected software, or it piggybacks on other malware, but seems to be more prevalent for home users. This makes its detection a non trivial task,” said Raiu.

“It has worm capabilities, meaning, it can spread through networks, by copying itself to other computers directly. When it does that, it takes 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.”

Other popular malware affecting Jordanian users in the same month included Mabezat – 8.84 per cent of all infected computers - which operates by attaching itself to executables, while being polymorphic and spreading through network drives.

© Al Bawaba