Malware Top Worry, Shows Sophos in its 2011 Mid-Year E-Threats Report

According to the Mid-Year 2011 Security Threat Report, which Sophos recently published, starting from 2011, a mean of 150,000 malicious programs has been detected daily. Help Net Security published this in news on August 1, 2011.

Furthermore, the security company observed 19,000 fresh malevolent URLs too daily during January-June 2011 out of which 80% were authentic websites, which had been compromised.

In the meantime, assaults with malicious software continue to be the greatest online danger to users of PCs since Search Engine Optimization corruption and fake anti-virus scams are commonplace.

Also, prominent hacking assaults on corporate houses and government agencies have been predominant across the security scenario of 2011. Consequently, lower attention has been paid to other security problems that are capable of causing much more danger to governments, businesses and consumers.

Vice-President Mark Harris of SophosLabs says that during 2011, there's been a constantly flowing high volume of malicious programs that mainly spread through the Web for executing both mass-scale and personalized assaults. Sys.con Media published this in news on August 1, 2011.

Harris further says that the increased number of scareware attacks needs an immediate effort by consumers and IT firms towards deploying extra defenses and protection for the Web so that the attack fields related to the tools or devices they utilize can be reduced.

Additionally according to the report, USA continues to rank No.1 among the top malware hosting countries even though the entire amount of malicious software the country hosts fell slightly in H1-2011. Russia, however, is currently on No.2 replacing France since 2010.

Alongside all these, the Mid-Year 2011 Security Threat Report of Sophos as well spotted Search Engine Poisoning, commonly referred to as Black-Hat SEO, as rising, putting any sized business at risk. Online crooks maliciously played with search results on Yahoo, Bing and Google for enticing Web-surfers into browsing malevolent sites, which planted Trojans, worms, viruses or rogue AV applications onto their PCs.

In the end, the report highlighted that search engine corruption assaults were highly effective, as also were responsible for over 30% of the entire malicious software SWA (Sophos' Web Appliance) identified.

Related article: Malware Authors Turn More Insidious

» SPAMfighter News - 8/11/2011