Symantec: Phishing and Trojan attacks to continue increasing

Symantec: Phishing and Trojan attacks to continue increasing

In a news which won’t please many network administrators and ISPs of the world, a leading security software firm Symantec has reported that attempts of Phishing and stealing information from corporate computers is increasing by the day and would continue to grow in the near future. They released a report today, which claimed that companies faced as many as 13.6 security attacks on a daily basis during the second half of last year compared to 10.6 daily attacks in the first.

In addition, the company reported that around 1,403 new security flaws and vulnerabilities were discovered in the second half of 2004 which is again a massive increase of 13% compared to the first half of the last year. With these kinds of trends, life is not going to be any easier for the tech people in the companies, which rely heavily on the Internet in their daily routine.

As per the report, around 50% of all attempts were aimed at stealing or obtaining private information from the targeted machines. Around one-third of the codes were Trojan horses. Phishing on the other hand is a growing trend and continues to remain a big problem especially with banks and credit card companies. The company claimed that their applications blocked on an average 9 million Phishing incidents per week last year. During the last month of 2004 alone, this number had grown to a massive 33 million per week.

Microsoft applications like the SQL server remained the most targeted software around. The most common attack being the Microsoft SQL Server Resolution Service Stack Overflow Attack. Let us hope that with the new initiatives the world’s largest software company has taken in the last few months and the release of their Anti-Spyware Application… we would see this number stabilizing if not slimming down.