On April 14th, Microsoft released the latest update to the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool. This month as you know from Scott Molenkamp’s blog post, we added Win32/Waledac. In fact, of the top 5 families, worms make up 3 of the slots: Win32/Taterf, Win32/Frethog, and Win32/Koobface.

Family Name

Report Count

Taterf

1,166,975

Frethog

390,967

Alureon

328,554

Koobface

142,164

Cutwail

134,549

Worm:Win32/Koobface has actually moved up one slot to #4 from last month’s telemetry update. Jeff Williams has described the industry approach to deal with this type of threat in his blog entry. Worm:Win32/Taterf is on the top of the list, for prevalence. Matt McCormack discussed this threat in greater detail in a blog post. There are a lot of worms out there on the Internet, so be careful out there: make sure to keep your antimalware software up to date, don't run programs you don't trust, run with an up to date firewall, and keep up to date with both application and operating system updates.

--Jeremy Croy