Cybercrime Increasing Alarmingly - SonicWALL

On 6th August, 2010, SonicWALL, Inc., a prominent security firm, published its mid-year report on the highest cybercrime trends for the year 2010, as per which Web-based attacks and risk to corporate cloud computing increased drastically during January-June, 2010.

Between 1st July, 2009 to 30th June, 2010, the firm detected cyber attacks globally and discovered the latest and future high security risks, like intrusions, malware, antivirus and email security violation which consumers and institutions experience.

The report shows drastic increase in cybercrime patterns containing Web- and Cloud-based threats hovering massively and growing rapidly.

According to the report, cases of malware detection increased 300% in the first half of the year, ranging from 60 million to around 180 million detections. The company is detecting around 3 million malware attacks, 400 million tried online attacks and 400 million spam email, per day.

In addition to this, attacks on web and Software as a Service (SaaS) applications contained only 4% of all cyber attacks during 2009. However, by July, 2010 it became 45% of all cybercrime attacks, surpassing SQL injection, viruses and FTP attacks.

During first half of the year 2010, SonicWALL also observed a considerable rise in phishing attacks, which exploit tax scams, harming both the United States and United Kingdom - historically famous targets, and also Australia, Canada, China and India, increasingly.

As per SoniWALL, they are observing a drift from simple scams, like phishing, fooling of organizations, worms, viruses, towards more advanced attacks closing down network servers and cloud-based computer systems. Such advanced and sometimes mixed attacks are much harder to stop in comparison with the traditional attacks, as they normally exploit totally unseen and zero-day discrepancies and hence dodge signature-based shields.

The security experts said that, this accelerating growth rate reveals the main targets of the crooks. Since we and our businesses depend regularly on the Web, with our information and tools dwelling increasingly in the cloud, it is not at all astonishing that crime will shift there as fast as it can.

Hence, heuristics, algorithms and behavioral analysis would be required to provide security signatures which organizations get.

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» SPAMfighter News - 8/16/2010