Symantec Corp's latest security report says that cyber crime has become an increasingly professional business and that malicious code and services are being sold in open markets on the Internet.
The Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), Volume XII covers the period from Jan. 1, 2007, through June 30, 2007 and finds that professionally developed toolkits are being sold in the underground economy. Credit cards continued to be the top commodity sold by cyber criminals accounting for 22 percent of all advertisements, while bank accounts totaled 21 percent.
Symantec said it was able to detect 237 vulnerabilities in plug-ins used on web browsers up from 74 found in the latter half of 2006. 61 percent of all e-mail traffic was made up of spam. Surprisingly 58 percent of enterprises are braced to lose major data at least once every five years.
"In the last several Internet Security Threat Reports, Symantec discussed a significant shift in attackers motivated from fame to fortune," said Arthur Wong, senior vice president, Symantec Security Response and Managed Services.
Some 46 percent of all data loss was attributed to theft or loss of computer, Symantec found. Malicious code that was inserted in an attempt to steal data for online games accounted for 5 percent of all such code, the report said.
"The Internet threats and malicious activity we are currently tracking demonstrate that hackers are taking this trend to the next level by making cyber crime their actual profession, and they are employing business-like practices to successfully accomplish this goal," Wong concluded.
For the complete report, please visit http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/theme.jsp?themeid=itrisk_report)
