Secure Computing Lists Current Threats

By Jeff Feinman

September 15, 2008 —  Companies and individual users are increasingly being attacked through malicious Web content and blended security strikes, according to a report from enterprise gateway security company Secure Computing and its Research and Anti-Malware Team.

The threats challenging the enterprise today involve attacks on both e-mail and Web security, and not having correlated protection between the two can cause security problems. Secure Computing’s Q2 Internet Threat Report, released in mid-August, said most enterprise computer security threats are and will continue to be driven by financial motives.

The report shows that the amount of spam initially increased by 280 percent from the second quarter of 2007 to the second quarter of 2008. Since March, Secure Computing executives said, the amount has dropped by 40 percent.

Also, the report indicated that in the second quarter of 2007, 300,000 new zombie computers, which are computers accessed without the owner's knowledge by hackers, were detected. In the second quarter of 2008, the number of new zombie computers dropped by 50 percent to 150,000.

“We are witnessing change every single day in how the cybercriminals are developing new vectors of attack through spam, malicious Web content, spyware and botnet deployments,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, director of intelligence analysis at Secure Computing.

The report said that new anonymous proxies, which are tools that attempt to make activity on the Internet untraceable, rose significantly in early April and mid-May of this year, reaching up to 600 new anonymous proxies per day at certain points. There was also a big rise in new malware sites in late April, rising up to over 10,000 per day.

Another figure found by Secure Computing is that over 16 percent of all spam originates from the United States. That amount was well above the second largest distributing country of spam, which was Russia at just under 7 percent. Brazil, Italy and Turkey were also among the highest senders.

Secure Computing executives recommended that users make sure their security software is up to date, and that a multilayered approach for detecting and blocking attacks is implemented. The company said that its TrustedSource global reputation system not only detects inbound threats, but also outbound actions from computers that may have been infected at some point. Alperovitch said TrustedSource is in an “excellent position” to identify new security trends and protect its user from malicious threats.



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