Annual Report for 2009 by Blue Coat Released

A firm that deals in Application Delivery Networking, Blue Coat Systems, in the last week of March 2010, released its yearly Blue Coat Web Security Report for 2009.

The report mentions that malware has become unpredictable in two ways. One, several variations of a particular malware threat are bein authored to dodge antivirus scanners. Two, malware is likely to move around fast, thus making the URL filtering tools incapable of blocking them.

The report stated that in several cases, malware takes as little as two hours to move since a Web filtering solution recognizes a URL as a location that hosts malware, code updating is not a major concern, as per the reports published by inforsecurity-us.com on March 30, 2010.

The firm also informs that older malware plays a major role in the refinement of malware. No doubts that new malware like Gumblar and Conficker hit the Internet in 2009; many existing threats such as MyDoom and Netsky were t more dominant.

It was also discovered that online storage and software download websites were, as a matter of fact, the most common hiding locations for Web-based malware previous year. In comparison with the year 2008, there was a 200% increase in the number of online storage websites in 2009, proving them to be the best deployment vector for malware.

Also, the report claims that social networking websites encouraged Internet access activity last year, and made up for 25% of activity amongst the leading 10 URL categories for the year. Heavy dependency on social networking for communication also resulted in less use of Web-based e-mail, which came down in fame from fifth position in 2008 to ninth spot in 2009. Consequently, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have been heavily targeted by hackers in 2009.

Blue Coat also mentioned more famous trends like search-engine optimization and more refined and specialized attacks and stated that companies should aim at making the employees alert instead of strictly relying on new security appliances and tools.

To conclude, Blue Coat predicts that this year, Web threats will keep on increasing, social media techniques will become more susceptible to attacks. The report adds that spammers won't use e-mail to circulate malware. Instead, malware distributors will employ sensational topics.

» SPAMfighter News - 4/9/2010