Category: Statistics

“While identity fraud is still a serious criminal issue in the United States, (the) study points to significant identity fraud reduction as a direct result of changes in industry and consumer behaviors,” James Van Dyke, president and founder of Javelin, said in a statement announcing the results.

In January, retail giant TJX Companies announced that data thieves had stolen an large number of its customers’ credit-card information from a server that processed transactions.

http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/423

The poll also shows that corporate malfeasance worries about 40% of executives.

“No business can survive without customer trust,” Mike Dabadie, a division president at Harris Interactive, said in a written statement. Any breach of data security that would compromise that trust can have a devastating impact on the company’s reputation.”

Forty percent of those polled said they have put in use a crisis management plan, and of those executives, 85% said they were either very or somewhat satisfied with those plans.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml;?articleID=196701706

The report is startling in the sense that it confirms what many retailers have long feared. It’s a frustrating problem because so many legitimate security defenses are invisible and the most visible security features—such as displaying a sign noting security standards compliance—do little to truly secure the site. Also, credit card purchases are overwhelmingly protected against theft, so the true risk for consumers is quite small.

“For 90 percent of people, if they want that refrigerator, they are going to buy it,” said Avivah Litan, a Gartner analyst specializing in security who is also an author of the report. More than 85 percent of the consumers in the Gartner survey said they delete unexpected e-mail without opening it.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0%2C1895%2C2063979%2C00.asp?kc=EWEWEMNL112706EP21B

Results of the survey show that more users are adopting greynet applications while, at the same time, little progress has been made toward combating greynet-related attacks. Greynets – real-time communications applications that are often introduced by end users and use highly evasive techniques to traverse the network – pose myriad network and information security risks because they provide vectors for malware, intellectual property loss, identity theft and compliance risks.

A typical organization is estimated to spend nearly $130,000 per year on average to repair damage from greynet-related attacks, while the largest companies are estimated to spend upwards of $350,000 per year repairing damage from greynet-related attacks due to higher incident rates.

http://www.it-observer.com/news/6950/81_it_managers_report_security_incident_due_im_or_other_greynets/

While bulk emailers have, in the past, sent unwanted messages from a single server, increasingly the spam emanates from networks of compromised PCs, known as bot nets. The level of junk email has increased almost in lock step with the number of compromised systems used for spam, said David Hart, the administrator for Total Quality Management.

“What is most alarming is that new clients – internet addresses that we have never seen before and which could be new infections – have tripled since June,” said Hart, who posted a chart (http://tqmcube.com/tide.php) tracking the growth on his Web site this week.

Bots and bot nets have rapidly emerged as one of the major threats on the Internet (http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/195).

Tens of thousands of compromised PCs are frequently counted among a single bot net’s unwilling members, with some bot nets boasting as many as a million systems (http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/19).

Traditionally, the networks have been used to install adware (http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11353) on victims’ machines or level denial-of-service attacks (http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11392) at online companies as part of an extortion scheme. Now, spammers are frequently counted among the operators or the clients of bot nets. Last May, a spammer only identified as “PharmaMaster” used a bot net to target anti-spam provider Blue Security and its Internet service providers with a massive denial-of-service attack that blocked access to the companies for hours and, in the case of Blue Security, days. Because of the attack, the company exited the anti-spam business (http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11392). Many bot herders – as the criminals that infect computers with bot software are named – sell or rent bot nets (http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11370) to others to use, and spammers increasingly seem to be among their customers.

There is strong evidence that bot nets – networks of compromised PCs – are behind the recent jump in spam. Sunbelt Software analyzed the junk email messages received by one of its dummy accounts in the past 48 hours: The 1,110 blocked messages came from 160 different mail servers as determined by their Internet addresses. The data suggests that a large number of compromised PCs are participating in sending out spma.

“It’s pretty easy, once you start breaking out the numbers, to tell a bot net from a run-of-the-mill spam server,” Greg Kras, vice president of products for Sunbelt. “Honestly, I think the increase is an attempt to keep viability by the corporations that are doing spam,” Kras said

Because many spam and antivirus filters send back a rejection message to the sender, the actual owner of the email address will be inundated with replies. Other Internet users may not notice the increase, because the spam messages are blocked by email filters or by anti-spam software on their PCs.

Security researchers that use honey pots – heavily monitored computers that are allowed to be infected by malicious software to spy on the attackers – have also confirmed the connection (http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/328) between bot nets and spam, said Thorsten Holz, a graduate student and the founder of the German Honeynet Project. “Since more and more network operators shut down open mail relays or other administrators use black lists to block these open relays, the attackers have shifted their tactics: they use compromised machines – in the form of bot nets – to send out spam,” Holz said. “We should be teaching people not to do business with criminals and to stop giving credit cards to criminals,” Hart said.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/31/botnet_spam_surge/

Of 4 million Windows PCs found to be infected with some kind of malicious software in the first half of this year, about 2 million were running malicious remote control software, Microsoft said. The data is collected by Microsoft’s free Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, which runs when security updates are installed on Windows PCs.

While the number is high, it is actually a decrease from the second half of 2005, when Microsoft found that 68 percent of infected PCs contained a backdoor Trojan. Meanwhile, hackers are trying harder to make their networks of hijacked computers go unnoticed by moving to new Web-based techniques.

A computer compromised by such a Trojan horse, popularly referred to as a zombie PC, can be used by miscreants in a network of bots, or “botnet,” to relay spam and launch cyberattacks. Additionally, hackers often steal the victim’s data and install spyware and adware on PCs, to earn a kickback from the spyware or adware maker.

Rootkits, which make system changes to hide another piece of possibly malicious software, remain an uncommon threat. There has been a 50 percent reduction in this kind of attack against computers running Windows during the past six months, Microsoft said.

Microsoft introduced the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool in January last year. An updated version of the program ships monthly with Microsoft’s security updates. The tool aims to identify and remove prevalent malicious software from PCs.

http://news.com.com/Zombies+continue+to+chase+Windows+PCs/2100-7349_3-6129235.html?tag=nefd.top