Web Threats Becoming More Diverse

By Greg McNevin

August 15, 2008: Secure Computing has published its top threats for Q2 2008 and predicted trends for the rest of the year, the most notable of which is that spam volumes and the creation of new zombies have decreased, but new attack vectors are increasingly being focussed on.

Secure’s Q2 Internet Threat found that while decreases in spam and new zombies are evident, enterprises and home users are increasingly being attacked through malicious Web content and blended security attacks.

The company found that even though overall spam volume is up 280 percent from Q2 2007 to Q2 2008, spam volumes have decreased by 40 percent this quarter. Furthermore, Q2 of 2007 witnessed over 300,000 new zombies per day, and during the second quarter of 2008 Secure saw half that amount.

The research also shows that over 16 percent of all spam now originates from the U.S., which is more than twice the amount of the No. 2 country, Russia, and that male enhancement, product replica and prescription drug spam still holds the top three places of types of spam, proving that you can’t beat the oldies but goodies.

It also found that Swizzor, a rapidly growing ad/spyware family, now makes up more than 30 percent of all new malware in Q2 of 2008 and the ZBot spyware family (which steals users’ sensitive data while establishing a backdoor on infected computers to give the attackers full control) has grown significantly.

“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.

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