Malware is a serious threat for computers and hence companies like Microsoft are always on their toes. The Conficker, infected millions of computers across 200 countries, which included the home, business and also government computers, and went on to become the largest computer worm infection, known since the 2003 worm infection caused by ‘Welchia’.
IFrameRef worm
However, now Conficker has lost its position of number one to the new villain in town, ‘IFrameRef’. This computer worm is far more dangerous than Conficker since it is a small piece of HTML code, that redirects, typically to a chain of redirects, which contain other malware. IFrame is an HTML document that is embedded in another HTML document and is comparatively more threatening to enterprise computers, than home computers.
Says Microsoft:
The Conficker worm and other worms are still relatively dangerous to enterprise computers, but IFrameRef has now replaced these worms as the number one threat at work. Home users are encountering ever larger numbers of Keygens, which are much rarer in the enterprise.
Different malware have different impact on computers at home and that at work. Moreover, Internet usage pattern for home users and enterprise tend to differ with home users accessing internet for multiple functions such as gaming, shopping, chatting and watching videos, however with enterprise users, the usage is restricted to business related function. Also at enterprises, the internet usage may be limited or monitored, thereby restricting people from multiple usages. The infection telemetry data by Microsoft provides valuable information of different ways in which attackers target home and enterprise users and which are the threats likely to succeed in each environment.
One of most important practice that a user can adopt is to use a browser with built-in safety features and at the same time, pay attention to alerts and warnings encountered while browsing, says Microsoft. An antivirus or anti-malware is the best defense that a user has against threats or malware. However, unfortunately many computers do not have such updated software installed.
