Ke Ping (Ed.)
■ Criminals may purchase verified
credit card numbers for as little as $1, and they can buy a complete identity a
date of birth and U.S. bank account, credit card and government-issued
identification numbers for $14, according to Symantecs twice-yearly
Internet Security Threat Report released Monday [March 19, 2007].
■ About 1/3 third of all computer
attacks worldwide in the second half of 2006 originated from machines in the
United States. That makes the United States the most fertile breeding ground
for threats such as spam, phishing and malicious code easily surpassing
runners-up China, which generates 10% of attacks, and Germany, which generates 7
percent.
■ The United States also leads in bot network activity. Bots are compromised computers
controlled remotely and operating in concert to pump out spam or perform other
nefarious acts. The legitimate owner of the computer typically doesnt know the
machine has been taken over and the phenomenon is largely responsible for the
palpable increase in junk e-mail in the past half year. Spam made up 59%
of all e-mail traffic Symantec monitored.
■ The United States is also home to
more than half of the worlds underground economy servers typically corporate
computers that have been commandeered to facilitate clandestine transactions
involving stolen data and may be compromised for as little as two hours or as
long as two weeks.
■ One of the most startling findings:
The worldwide number of bot-infected computers rose
an increase of about 29 percent from the previous six months, to more than 6 million
computers total while the number of servers controlling them plunged. The
number of such command-and-control servers declined by about 25 percent to
around 4,700.
■ 26% of the worlds bot-infected computers were in China, a higher percentage
than any other country.
■ According to Symantec, Microsoft
Corp.s Internet Explorer was the most-targeted Web browser, attracting 77%
of all browser attacks.
■ Symantec said it expects to see more
threats begin to emerge against Microsofts Vista operating system. It also
expects multiplayer online games to be targeted by phishers,
who fool users into divulging passwords or other personal information by
creating fake Web sites that look like the real thing.
Based on Robertson,
J. (2007, March). Most computer attacks originate in