A quarter of all email includes a vicious link
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Data Protection, Blog, Spyware, Spam, Security on
That is the perhaps unsurprising warning contained in the MessageLabs Intelligence 2007 Security Report which was published today. In a double whammy of bad news, MessageLabs warn that spam is the most dominant menace on the IT security agenda with spam levels reaching a whopping 84.6 percent across the course of the year, plus of course the fact that 25 percent of email comes complete with a malicious link to take you directly to something very nasty indeed.
Perhaps the most worrying bit of this is that it is a trend that has stormed along, every pun intended because the Storm botnet attacks have played a huge part in the statistics, with only 3 percent of email-borne viruses containing malicious links at the start of the year. To be honest, I find that figure rather low in any case. My mailbox would suggest, from both the malicious link emails I get and the messages from folk who have received them, the problem has been rife for some time. Still, this trend towards malicious links does serve to demonstrate that virus writers are continuing to develop strategies to distribute malware.
MessageLabs also flag up the dangers of social network targeted threats during 2007, warning that this could increase in 2008. Certainly during 2007 there were several significant waves of such targeted attacks which appeared on the radar. Indeed, the report suggests that levels rose from one attack per day in 2006 to more than 1,100 over a 16 hour period during September 2007. The most recent being in November when the first sector specific attack took place with almost 1,000 individual attacks aimed at the Financial Sector.
looking at the year by the numbers, the reports comes up with the following to brighten your day:
MessageLabs identified an average of 1,253 new web sites per day harboring malware, which equates to almost half a million new malicious web sites appearing throughout the year.
The average virus level for 2007 was 1 in 117.7 emails (0.8 percent) which reflects a fall of 0.6 percent since 2006 where levels averaged at 1 in 67.9 emails.
The number of phishing attacks rose to 1 in 156 emails across 2007, compared to 1 in 274.2 emails in 2006.
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