And while Mac users would like to add, "for Windows users," when one takes into account things like phishing, it's risky for all.
In what should be no surprise to anyone, the report noted that Web surfing remains the primary source of new infections in 2008. Additionally, the main focus of infections is confidential information: passwords, credit card info, account info, anything that can be used to make a buck, basically.
In fact, the above table shows what "services" and "information" are most popular on underground websites. Credit card information, as in 2007, is tops on the list, but it has really outpaced #2, bank account information, which was second in 2007 as well.
Some highlights (or lowlights) from the report:
- Most Web-based attacks are global, but most originate from the United States (38%), followed by China (13%) and the Ukraine (12%). Regionally, 6 of the top 10 countries where Web-based attacks were prominent were from the EMEA region. Combined, these countries accounted for 45% of the worldwide total, more than any other region.
- Phishing continued to grow. In 2008, Symantec detected 55,389 phishing website hosts, an increase of 66% over 2007, when Symantec detected 33,428 phishing hosts. Financial services accounted for 76% of phishing lures in 2008 compared to 52% in 2007.
- Still more spam! Symantec observed a 192% increase in spam detected across the Internet as a whole, from 119.6 billion messages in 2007 to 349.6 billion in 2008. In 2008, bot networks were responsible for the distribution of approximately 90% of all spam e-mail. For those ISPs saying there's too much traffic for them to handle, maybe they should look into this.
- The United States was the country most frequently targeted by denial-of-service (DOS) attacks in 2008, accounting for 51% of the worldwide total.
- Symantec documented 5,491 vulnerabilities in 2008; this is a 19% increase over the 4,625 vulnerabilities documented in 2007.
- Apple fans should note that of any browser analyzed in 2008, Safari had the longest window of exposure to exploits, with a nine-day average; Mozilla browsers had the shortest window of exposure in 2008, averaging less than one day.
- The company detected 1.6 million malicious code threats in 2008, or 265% more than in 2007.
Naturally, the report devoted an entire section to Conficker, which it said had infected more than 1 million individual computers by the end of 2008, growing to more than 3 million infected systems during the first quarter of 2009.
