Symantec publishes report on IT security in 2008

17th December 2008

Symantec submitted an annual report on IT security in 2008 called MessageLabs Intelligence 2008 Security Report.
The general idea of the report is the following: Internet fraudsters just carry on improving their ways of attacking, thus, turning more inexperienced users into victims.
On average, there was 81.2% of spam in 2008, against 84.6% in 2007. The peak of spam letters was in February this year, when the volume of spam per month accounted for about 83%. 9 out of every 10 spam messages were distributed by means of bot networks, including the largest of them, such as Storm, Cutwail and Srizbi.
In 2008, several cases of unusual spam were recorded. First, for the 12 months there have been reports of hacking almost all popular CAPTCHA-systems used as a barrier to the spam robots.
The report also runs there is a trend appeared in 2008 of using different methods of attacks on social networks, sites blogs, communities and so on. This year the experts noticed the emergence of software "black market" for complex multi-step attacks on social networks. The developers were selling everything: from trivial spam machines to sophisticated systems for searching and exploiting vulnerabilities.
In 2008 there were more web than e-mail attacks. 1 out of every 143.8 e-mails contained malicious codes (compare to 1 out of 117 in 2007). Most of the time attackers used trojans (53% of cases).
As for sophisticated fraud, the # 1 topic of the year was, of course, Olympics in Beijing. The second place belongs to the financial crisis, still popular.