According to Symantec, malicious activity in 2008 amounted to 60 percent of all the activity they have recorded since they started keeping records. Last year, they recorded 1.6 million new malicious code signatures and blocked 245 million malware attacks from their users every month.
Many of these attacks – when the words malware or malicious code are used – are designed to steal information (preferably financial) or take command and control of a computer. Once command and control of a computer is accomplished, it’s called a zombie and networked into a botnet. A botnet works as a super computer and is used to spam the electronic universe. Some of these spam e-mails contain even more malware, which infects more unprotected systems.
In 2008, Symantec saw a 31 percent increase in the number of zombie computers. In 2008, Symantec observed an average of more than 75,000 active bot-infected computers each day, a 31 percent increase from 2007. Symantec's latest report, which covers January to December of 2008, suggests that 90 percent of these attacks are designed to steal information. Attacks using key loggers – which log a computer's keystrokes and send them to the criminals who installed the malicious code – grew from 72 to 76 percent of the activity observed by Symantec's security lab.
Many of these attacks use a technique known as phishing, which is normally delivered in a spam e-mail. Phishing either tricks people into giving up their information (social engineering) or gets them to download malicious code, which makes the process automatic. Last year, Symantec detected 55,389 phishing website hosts, which is where you are sent if you click on a link in a phish-mail. Spoofed financial services companies accounted for 76 percent of these lures compared to 52 percent in 2007.
Spam, which delivers most of this activity, continued to grow, too. This equated to 349.6 billion spam messages in 2008 compared to 119.6 billion spam messages in 2007, which is a 192 percent increase. According to the monthly spam report from Symantec, last month's spam social engineering themes included mortgage rescue, tax season, terror, and scareware (fake antivirus solutions) for the much anticipated Conficker worm that was designed to hit on April Fool's Day. Please note that Conficker a.k.a. Downdaup is still a problem, but it didn't spread its gloom and doom on April 1 to the degree it was expected to.
Cybercriminals have always been quick to exploit the headlines and with the sour economy in the news have been targeting the financial industry. Here also, Symantec saw an increase of personal and financial information being stolen by using financial institutions as bait. In 2008, this amounted to 29 percent of the activity compared to 10 percent in 2007.
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