MessageLabs Released 2007 Annual Security Report

MessageLabs, the top-most provider of cyber security solutions to businesses around the world, released its annual MessageLabs Intelligence 2007 Security Report on December 10, 2007. It says that social networking sites were the most vulnerable with the frequency of attack shooting up from one in a day during 2006 to over 1,100 in less than 16 hours during September 2007.

As per MessageLabs, spam happens to be the most prominent hazard on the agenda of IT security, constituting 84.6% of total cyber threats. This figure doesn't take into account a quarter of e-mails that come laden with a malicious link, which directs one to a nasty page offering products on sale. Most cyber criminals resort to spam for spreading malware by hiding them in attachments like MP3 files and PDF.

Social networking sites like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace got the greatest attention from cyber criminals because a large number of people give away a lot of their sensitive personal information through their profiles. Security experts said that Facebook was one of the primary targets of cyber offenders in 2007. MessageLabs accordingly flagged up the risks associated with social network-directed attacks during 2007, and has warned further against the dangers in 2008 from this segment.

MessageLabs revealed that on an average, 1,253 new websites fall prey to malware in a single day, which adds up to nearly half million new websites with malicious content in a year. The average virus infected e-mail counted to 1 in 117.7 during 2007. Thus, infected e-mails have dipped below one percent, which is a 60% drop since 2006 when 1 in 67.9 e-mails were infected. The quantum of phishing attacks too declined to 1 in 156 e-mails during 2007, as against 1 in 274.2 e-mails in 2006.

Chief Security Analyst at MessageLabs, Mark Sunner, said in a statement that 2007 shall be a remarkable year for the online security industry because consumers handed their personal credentials to cyber criminals through social networking sites and Storm botnet took the market by storm, as per the company's press release published by marketwire on December 10, 2007.

Related article: Mozilla Rules Out Bug in Its Firefox

» SPAMfighter News - 12/22/2007