Cyber Crooks Making Higher Efforts to Infect Computers

Security firm Kaspersky Lab recently revealed that more than 327 Million attempts were made to compromise computers worldwide in the first quarter of 2010. This clearly represents 26.8% increase from the figure reported by the firm in the fourth quarter of 2009.

The flourishing cybercrime is the gift of expanding reach of the Internet itself, while increasing rate of unemployment and lack of stringent legislation provided the other essential ingredients, stated the security firm.

Moreover, the geographical distribution of malicious assaults is consistently changing. China, Russia and India, with 31.07%, 9.82% and 6.19% respectively, were the top three targets in the last quarter of the previous year. However there was no change in the positions of these countries in the first quarter of 2010, but the attacks on Chinese Internet users dropped drastically to 18.05%, whereas those targeting Russian users increased to 13.18%.

Kaspersky Lab noted that drive-by downloads as well as malicious websites exploiting security holes in PDF viewers, browsers and their plug-ins serve are the two major channels for these threats to spread.

Exploits of the second type surged by 21.3% and nearly 50% of them targeted vulnerabilities in Adobe software, discovered Kaspersky. The huge popularity of Adobe and its capability to run on multiple platforms were the main reasons behind this.

The firm also observed that by the end of Q1 2010, trojans accounted for 21.46% of the total threats identified on the users' PCs. Adware was the second most prevalent threat during the same period.

Moreover, rogue anti-virus software continue to grow and had apparently flooded the Internet last year. Various techniques are used by the developers of such malware to defraud users, like imitating the interfaces of well-known security solutions. The frequency of the emergence of rogue anti-virus applications, supposedly providing technical assistance also, is increasing.

The security experts, commenting on the rising rate of infection threats, said that the threat landscape that we are seeing today is very much different from that we saw a few years back. The indications are dreadful and individuals, government and businesses are required to be constantly cautious of the risks surfacing in the cyber space that try to exploit even the slightest of the security vulnerabilities.

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» SPAMfighter News - 6/7/2010