Network and Computer Security stats
[tag]Symantec[/tag] issues their [tag]Internet Security Threat Report[/tag] every six months.
The Symantec Internet Security Threat Report offers analysis and discussion of threat activity over a six-month period. It covers Internet attacks, vulnerabilities, malicious code, phishing, spam and security risks as well as future trends. The eleventh version of the report, released March 19, 2007, is now available.
Here are some interesting [tag]statistics[/tag] from that report. Comments by me in italics
- The government sector accounted for 25 percent of all [tag]identity theft[/tag]-related [tag]data breach[/tag]es, more than any other sector.
Recent changes in US government regulations should see this improve, IT staff have their jobs on the line.
- The theft or loss of a computer or other data-storage medium made up 54 percent of all identity theft related data breaches during this period.
It’s well past time to step up legal and financial repercussions for anyone who loses an unencrypted laptop or companies that don’t secure their desktop computers and servers against theft.
- The United States was the top country of attack origin, accounting for 33 percent of worldwide attack activity.
most of those attacks came from home computers that have been compromised because the user was too stupid or too lazy to take the appropriate precautions
- Symantec recorded an average of 5,213 denial of service (DoS) attacks per day, down from 6,110 in the first half of the year.
I wonder how they got this info? In any case large DDoS attacks are becoming more commercially focussed as that’s where the money is
- The [tag]United States[/tag] was the target of most [tag]DoS attacks[/tag], accounting for 52 percent of the worldwide total.
- The government sector was the sector most frequently targeted by DoS attacks, accounting for 30 percent of all detected attacks.
Well of course, that’s where the majority of the world’s servers are
- Microsoft [tag]Internet Explorer[/tag] was targeted by 77 percent of all attacks specifically targeting Web browsers.
- Home users were the most highly targeted sector, accounting for 93 percent of all targeted attacks.
IRC script kiddies, ’nuff said
- Symantec observed an average of 63,912 active bot-infected computers per day, an 11 percent increase from the previous period.
This will only get worse in the future
- [tag]China[/tag] had 26 percent of the world’s bot-infected computers, more than any other country
- The United States had the highest number of bot command-and-control computers, accounting for 40 percent of the worldwide total.
Interesting - not certain what to make of that. China is late to the PC revolution game for the masses so their users are likely to be more naive in that respect . They also have a much larger population base. C&C in the us makes sense as that’s where the best connectivity is found (generally)
- Beijing was the city with the most bot-infected computers in the world, accounting for just over five percent of the worldwide total.
- The United States accounted for 31 percent of all [tag]malicious activity[/tag] during this period, more than any other country.
One of the problems with these stats is the computers they are tracking are infected and can be controlled from anywhere in the world, the usual spots being, Vietnam, Indonesia, Russia, Romania and other former soviet bloc countries.
- Israel was the highest ranked country for malicious activity per Internet user, followed by Taiwan and Poland.
- Fifty-one percent of all underground economy servers known to Symantec were located in the United States, the highest total of any country.
Ah the US Capitalist at work
- Eighty-six percent of the credit and debit cards advertised for sale on underground economy servers known to Symantec were issued by banks in the United States.
Ah the US Capitalist at work
One of the more controversial claims made in the report is that for the last 6 months [tag]Microsoft[/tag] has been more secure than its competitors during this period of time. The report found that over the course of those six months, for the five operating systems they monitored (Windows, Red Hat Linux, Solaris, OS X, HP-UX) MS Windows had the fewest number of patches and took the least amount of development time to code and release those patches.
What this means is that MS is finally taking security of the OS to heart. Most of the exploits out there now, that aren’t targeting IE, are for 3rd party applications and we can see that in the number of patches required recently on OS X . The OS X and Vista OS cores are pretty secure it is the secondary applications, some from the vendor, most 3rd party, that are causing the problems now. Even a fully patched XP core is quite secure.
