Cyber attacks increasingly target home users
Home users account for a whopping 86% of all targeted attacks followed by financial services businesses like banks.
Symantec has identified increased attacks aimed at client-side applications, increased use of evasive tactics to avoid detection, and that large, widespread Internet worms have given way to smaller, more targeted attacks focusing on fraud, data theft, and criminal activity.
“Attackers see end users as the weakest link in the security chain and are constantly targeting them in an effort to profit,” said Patrick Evans, regional director, Symantec Africa.
New techniques used to evade detection
Exacerbating the problem is that attackers are becoming more adept at hiding tracks by using a variety of techniques to prolong their presence on systems in order to steal information or hijack the PC for marketing purposes.
Attackers have begun to adopt new techniques such as targeting malicious code at client-side applications including Web browsers, e-mail clients, and other desktop applications. Vulnerabilities affecting Web applications accounted for 69 percent of all vulnerabilities documented by Symantec in the first half of 2006.
Vulnerabilities in Web browsers have also become increasingly prominent, with 47 vulnerabilities documented in Mozilla browsers (compared to 17 in the last reporting period), 38 in Microsoft Internet Explorer (compared to 25), and 12 in Apple Safari (compared to six).
Phishers are also attempting to bypass filtering technologies by creating multiple randomised messages and distributing those messages is a broad uncontrolled fashion. During the first six months of 2006, 157,477 unique phishing messages were detected, marking an increase of 81 percent over the previous period.
The financial services sector was the most heavily phished, accounting for 84 percent of phishing sites.
Spam made up 54 percent of all monitored e-mail traffic, a slight increase from 50 percent the previous period. Most spammers are opting to exclude malicious code with their spam to decrease the chances of being blocked and instead include links to Web sites hosting malicious code.
Motivation for online security attacks
Financial gain remains the motivation behind many of the threats during the reporting period. Symantec identified more than 4.6 million distinct, active bot network computers and observed an average of 57,717 active bot network computers per day during this period.
Bot networks are also commonly used in denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, a major threat to organisations as these attacks can result in the disruption of communication, loss of revenue, damage to brand and reputation, and exposure to criminal extortion schemes. During the first half of 2006, Symantec observed an average of 6,110 DoS attacks per day.
The data collected for Symantec’s survey was from 40 000 sensors in over 180 countries in addition to a database covering more than 18,000 vulnerabilities affecting more than 30,000 technologies from more than 4,000 vendors. The information was gathered from 1 January until the 30th of June 2006.
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