Busy year for Cyber-Criminals
Just how busy were cyber-criminals last year? If the latest Symantec Internet Security Threat Report is any indication, they’ve never been busier. According to Volume XIV of the report, issued in April, attackers released Trojan horses, viruses, and worms (also called “malicious code”) at a record pace in 2008, primarily targeting computer users’ confidential information.
Specifically, Symantec documented a staggering 1.6 million instances of malicious code on the Web in 2008. That compares with 624,267 instances in 2007.
Vincent Weafer, Symantec’s vice president of security content and intelligence, put these numbers in perspective in a recent interview with Reuters. “Sixty percent of all the [malicious code] threats in the past 20 years came in the last 12 months alone,” Weafer said.
Weafer added that this explosive growth can be attributed to the increasing professionalism of malicious code development.
In response, Symantec created more than 1.6 million new malicious code signatures in 2008, a record number. These signatures helped block an average of more than 245 million attempted attacks around the world each month, according to the report.
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