State of Internet Security Report: could do better
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Security, Internet on
Websense has just released its ‘State of Internet Security Q1- Q2‘ report which could, truth be told, have been summed up in two simple words rather than 13 complex pages of graphs and charts.
Those two words being: well, duh!
It’s not that I do not like looking at statistics and graphs as much as the next overly anal security geek, but when the thrust of a report is that the majority of information stealing rascals are using trusted sources to host their malicious wares, and adds that Web 2.0 is of increasing interest to cyber-criminals, well I kind of think that my 10 year old son could have come to the same conclusion after hitting the tech news sites for a couple of hours of research.
I know, I know - you can only report on what is there when it comes to these kind of security trend analysis reports. In fact, I have ranted about them before, complaining that they will have little real world currency until all of them say much the same thing. After all, you cannot take an analysis of the same playing field seriously if everyone comes up with something completely different.
Do we really need to know that 60 percent of the top 100 most popular Web sites during this period were either host to malicious content of some kind or had a masked redirect to sites with the same? Probably, is the answer. At least there is a figure on it that makes you stop and say “oh bugger, are things really that bad” which has to be a good thing.
But adding padding such as more than 45 percent of that top 100 supported user generated content, or more than 75 percent of emails contained malicious or spammy links, and 29 percent of malicious web attacks had some kind of data stealing code element really is not necessary thanks very much.
“Today attackers are overwhelmingly forgoing creating their own malicious sites and targeting legitimate Web sites that have a built in base of visitors,” said Dan Hubbard, chief technology officer, Websense. “There is an element of trust in the Web 2.0 world that the Web sites we frequent every day are safe, but attackers are taking advantage of the ‘good reputations’ of Web sites to launch attacks.”
That was better, no need for the 13 page report after all…
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Make a comment
Tag cloud
Archives
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
Most commented posts
- Cuil frozen out: market share drops to next to nothing
20 comments
- Windows XP: the invincible OS
- Gatecrashing the WiFi hotspot party
- The 24 year old software that is still going strong
- Home workers are sick
- Big Brother Apple
- Spear phishing Catch 22 for Salesforce.com
- Dumbest phisher in history revealed
- Is BT misleading consumers with Option 2 broadband?
- Why ecommerce fails
Highest Rated Blog Posts
- Why ecommerce fails (100%)
- Betting on Hubdub technology (100%)
- Chinese whispers as government implicated in UK hack attacks (100%)
- Crimeware toolkit targets 10,000 trusted sites (100%)
- Black Hat risk to migrating VMs (100%)
- Tough on cyber crime, tough on the causes of cyber crime (100%)
- Firefox 3, Beta 4, Enhancements 900, Tested 5 (100%)
- Slowly slowly catchee Government IT monkey (100%)
- Who needs another set of web standards? (100%)
- The 6.5 billion quid hello (100%)