Spam, virus and malware: Highlights in 2007

On December 14, 2007, IronPort Systems, a business unit of Cisco and the company operating in the field of spam, virus and spyware protection for enterprises, published a report on the security situation in 2007. and Internet security trends. The IronPort report highlights current mainstream security trends and offers suggestions for more sophisticated new generation protection measures against Internet threats expected to emerge in the future. hybrid

Information is the currency of the new world

Spam, virus and malware attacks are very costly. The average user has to spend 5-10 minutes a day to 'fight' with spam. The cost of 'cleaning' is estimated at 500 USD per desktop. But more costly is data loss. Whether it's a dangerous attack, or an unintentional mistake, losing data can cause a company to lose brand power, reduce shareholder value and damage reputation and Reliability of customers. Electronic communications and data being rotated are the most dangerous for data loss in today's enterprise. Firewall solutions and other network security solutions currently do not include data loss capabilities to secure the data being circulated. Important management measures, such as scanning content, blocking communications that contain sensitive and encrypted data, are missing. An estimated 60 million people have data about themselves exposed in the past 13 months, and an estimated $ 20 billion is spent on 'cleaning up' costs and overcoming reduced performance. across the globe. Up to 60% of business data is stored on unprotected desktops and laptops. In addition, 48% of organizations do not have a policy to notify customers when their personal data is threatened.

Looking forward: Social Malware

Modern malware lends features from social networking and collaboration sites associated with Web 2.0. Malware is now a kind of malware capable of collaborating, adapting and being very smart. It hides before anti-malware programs - located on monthly or yearly business or family computers, without being detected. New variants of Trojans and malware are increasingly targeted and short-lived. This makes them more difficult to detect. The old view is that 'what I don't see will not harm me' is no longer valid. Organizations are increasingly under pressure to ensure the integrity of their sensitive information - be it credit card numbers, business income information or plans for new products. Malware writers are building sophisticated networks that are designed to collect these data, and are increasingly more difficult to detect and prevent. IT security teams need to take steps to evaluate the flow of malware in their networks and deploy a comprehensive security system that includes advanced techniques such as threat detection on the system. Network and network access control.

Other statistics and findings

General trends in spam and malware can be characterized by a larger number of more sophisticated, sneaky and more targeted attacks. Spam capacity has increased 100%, to more than 120 billion spam messages a day. That is, there are about 20 spam messages a day sent to every person on this earth.

Spam has become less focused on selling products and more focused on developing spam networks. Previous versions of spam attacks mainly sold certain types of products (pharmaceuticals, low interest mortgages, etc.). However, spam now includes a growing number of links, pointing to websites spreading malware. This malware is often designed to further expand the size and size of the network, which was the first source of this spam.

Viruses are harder to see but are increasing in number. Virus writers have developed more than the previous mass-spread attacks like 'Netsky' and 'Bagel'. In 2007, the virus developed in many more forms and variants and mainly came with the very rapid growth of extremely sophisticated networks.

The validity period of a specific attack technique has decreased significantly. In previous years, spammers will deploy a key technique, such as using embedded images every month. More recent techniques, such as MP3 spam, last only for 3 days. But these smaller scale attacks are much more. While the 2006 image spam technique was a major new technique, in 2007 there were more than 20 types of attachments used in a variety of short-lived attack techniques.

Le Quang