"Understanding the current threat landscape is critical in helping us protect our citizens' online interactions and ensure the availability of our critical systems," said David Jordan, chief information security and privacy officer for Arlington County, Va. "The current threat intelligence in Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report, combined with our use of leading-edge security technologies, helps us ensure the highest degree of security for our citizens and government agencies."
Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report notes that home users are the most targeted attack sector, accounting for 86 percent of all targeted attacks, followed by financial services businesses. 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.
During this reporting period, 18 percent of all distinct malicious code samples detected by Symantec had not been seen before, indicating that attackers are more actively attempting to evade detection by signature-based antivirus and intrusion detection/prevention systems.
Phishers are also attempting to bypass filtering technologies by creating multiple randomized messages and distributing those messages in 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. At the same time, 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.
Financial gain remains the motivation behind many of the threats during the reporting period. For example, bot networks can be used not only to spread malicious code, but to send spam or phishing messages, download adware and spyware, attack an organization, and harvest confidential information. 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 organizations as these attacks can result in disrupted 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.
