2009 Saw Two-fold Surge in Malicious Programs

On April 20, 2010, Secuirty Company Symantec released its Internet Security Threat Report Volume XV. It discovered that while international trends in cybercrime activities indicate to the rise in sophistication of online attacks, the amount of spam, malware, targeted threats and phishing attacks is increasing on a large scale. Almost 240 Million different harmful programs were discovered in 2009, which is twice the number found in 2008.

The report claims that techn-savvy hackers are racking up around 100 attacks per second on the systems worldwide. Although most of the attacks do not bring in damage of any kind, Symantec claims that one attack in every 4.5 seconds does put a significant impact on a system.

The annual report suggests that the series of attacks was triggered by a sharp increase in the circulation of malicious software. As per Symantec, this meant that 51% of all the viruses, trojans and other harmful programs it has ever come across were logged in 2009.

A Public Sector Technology Manager at Symantec, Tony Osborne claimed that the sharp increase in malware can be attributed to the rising fame of easy-to-access toolkits that budding hackers use to turn out their own malware, as per the news published by bbc.co.uk on April 20, 2010.

Mr. Osborne stated that some of the toolkits were available without any cost, and some are very expensive.

For example, one of them known as Zeus was available for almost $700 (£458) in the underground market, and the company recognized around 90,000 distinct kinds of malware developed with the Zeus toolkit with some of them being so highly successful that their developers are now providing telephonic assistance for their use.

The report also shows that the rising problem of sophisticated attacks hitting certain businesses is usually with the objective of stealing intellectual property instead of customer card information. This was emphasized by Google early this year (2010) when it stated that its staff had been hit by targeted attacks which used their details collected on social networking websites.

Related article: “Loopholes did not cause online banking thefts”: ICBC

» SPAMfighter News - 5/3/2010