Enterprise - Security - Increase in cyber attack against home users

Symantec today warned home users against cyber attackers who had doubled their ‘evil’ designs to hack personal computers for theft, fraud and other financially motivated crimes.

“Home users have very poor established security measures in place,” the report said, thus making them the most targeted group, accounting for 86 per cent of all attacks, followed by financial services businesses.

The Symantec Internet Security Threat Report released here said that attackers are now using a variety of techniques to escape detection and prolong their presence on systems in order to gain more time to steal information, hijack the computer for marketing purposes, provide remote access, or otherwise compromise confidential information for profit.

"Attackers see end users as the weakest link in the security chain and are constantly targeting them in an effort to profit," commented Vishal Dhupar, managing director, Symantec India.

“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” said Dhupar.

Dhupar said that though software vendors and enterprises try to adapt to changing threat environment by implementing security best practices, 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.

The vulnerabilities affecting Web applications accounted for 69 per cent 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),” the report said.

The report added that during the reporting period, 18 per cent 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.

The report also looked at Phishers who also attempt 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 per cent over the previous period. At the same time, spam made up 54 per cent of all monitored e-mail traffic, a slight increase from 50 per cent 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,” the report added.