Four-time Growth in Targeted Assaults Observed during 2011: Symantec

Symantec Corp. lately published its November 2011 Symantec Intelligence Report whose outcomes disclose that the overall targeted assaults on a daily basis show a four-time growth since January 2011. In terms of mean targeted assaults, a total of 94 were caught daily in November 2011 compared to 25 during January 2011.

Delving further, the report says that during November 2011, one e-mail within a total 255 messages carried malware; however, merely one e-mail within 8,300 was an extremely targeted. As per Symantec, in general 1 in a total 2m e-mails were related to a targeted assault.

Moreover, the security company's report states that considering 48bn e-mails did the rounds daily, any extremely targeted assault similar to the above kind is responsible for an extremely tiny rate of total e-mail; however, that isn't surely not so less as it was at 2010-end. SCMagazineUK.com published this on December 6, 2011.

Senior Intelligence Analyst Paul Wood for Symantec.cloud stated that the mentioned targeted assaults had the purpose of acquiring constant admission into the network of the company or organization targeted, often seeking to facilitate admission into secret data from the remote. The assaults had the ability for resulting in severe destruction to a company as also after a substantial time towards posing a considerable danger to many countries' economic prosperity, Wood explained. Marketwatch.com reported this on December 6, 2011.

Furthermore, according to Symantec's report, organizations having over 2,500 employees comprised the greatest of all entities 'targeted' when 36.7 assaults were stopped daily. Conversely, the SMBs (small-and-medium sized businesses) having less that 250 staff members experienced 11.6 assaults stopped everyday.

Finally, in addition to the above results, the security company notes that during 2011, APTs (advanced persistent threats) along with targeted malware comprised major news headlines, especially after the Stuxnet assaults, which occurred during 2010, as well as more recently when Duqu was discovered, the malicious program based on the identical Stuxnet worm's source code. Interestingly, though Stuxnet's source code isn't obtainable online, it doesn't imply that the actual writers wrote Duqu as well for, there might've been a sharing alternatively theft too of the code.

Related article: Free Web Host Services: spammer’s bull’s eye

» SPAMfighter News - 12/14/2011