On 2 November 1988 a 22-year old Cornell University student called Robert Morris released an internet worm capable of exploiting vulnerabilities in the UNIX operating system. It is estimated that it infected 10 percent of the internet including computer spy. Twenty years on, the scale of the malware problem has grown astronomically. Today’s internet attacks are organized and designed to steal information and resources from consumers and corporations. Although there have been instances of attacks driven by politics and religion, the main motivation is fnancial. The web is now the primary route by which cybercriminals infect computers, mainly due to the fact that increasing numbers of organizations have secured their email gateways. As a consequence, cybercriminals are planting malicious code on innocent websites. This code then simply lies in wait and silently infects visiting computers.
The scale of this global criminal operation has reached such proportions that we discover one new infected webpage every 4.5 seconds – 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Computer spy activities such as spyware, adware, malware are world wide threats. 2008 proved that malware is more than just a Microsoft problem. Although the sheer number of Windows threats far outweighs attacks against any other platform, cybercriminals are turning their attention to other operating systems such as Apple Macintosh, and vulnerable cross-platform software. This seems likely to continue in 2009, with the increasing popularity of portable devices such as the iPhone, iPod Touch, Google Android phone and ultra-mobile netbooks.
2008 computer spy activities
Biggest malware threats – SQL injection attacks against websites and the rise of scareware
New web infections – one new infected webpage discovered by Sophos every 4.5 seconds
Malicious email attachments – fve times more at the end of 2008 than at the beginning
Spam-related webpages – one new webpage discovered by Sophos every 15 seconds
New scareware websites – five identifed every day
Top malware-hosting country – US with 37 percent
Top spam-relaying continent – Asia with 36.6 percent
Amount of business email that is spam – 97 percent
It remains paramount that organizations defend themselves at all levels of their business, not just at the email and web gateways. Networks, desktops, laptops and mobile devices must be comprehensively secured to defend against the myriad threats posed by the criminal underground
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