Majority Attacks Posed on US Companies Originate from US

The recently released Global Threat Intelligence Report by Security solutions provider, Solutionary, while claim holds true against China and other countries to be behind a large number of cyberattacks against the US organizations, in actual about 83% of all the attacks originate from the US IP address space.

The study has also found that distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) is expensive. Organizations spend about $6,500 (5,000 EUR) every hour to recover from such attacks, and the sum doesn't include the revenue that they have possibly lost due to the downtime.

Even the expense of malware attacks is quite remarkable. Upto 30 days are spent inorder to mitigate the attacks and recuperate from them, as evident from the cost of an activity which is over $3,000 (2,300 EUR) per day.

According to the latest report of Solutionary, 54% of malware samples obtain past antivirus and endpoint security applications. However, only 46% of malware samples are being detected by anti-virus software. Nevertheless, advanced techniques are applied by mass-distribution malware for overcoming anti-virus software and spam writers also develop new variants on a frequent basis. The codes that are written are thereafter tested against the fine-tuning of the anti-virus test and undergo the detection techniques until they fail all types of mechanisms. The security firm explains that these factors prevent anti-virus software from being completely effective by preventing infections.

According to Solutionary, interestingly when it comes to malware attacks, financial and retail sectors are the most targeted. However, 45% of malware attacks are attempted towards financial customers and 35% towards retail customers, mostly through phishing e-mails with malicious links or attachments.

Furthermore, according to Solutionary, Java is the most prominent software that are targeted in malware exploit kits that replaces Adobe PDF exploits. About 40% of the total exploits in exploit kits target Java. The cross-platform nature of these two technology thus explains the positions of these technologies as leading exploit targets.

Don Gray, Chief Security Strategist at Solutionary, says that this itself is a big fat, juicy target as published by darkreading.com on March 12, 2013.

Related article: Majority Of Computer Users Ignorant of Security & Privacy Settings

» SPAMfighter News - 3/20/2013