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 Symantec’s 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
■ 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 doesn’t 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 world’s “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 world’s bot-infected computers were in
■ 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 Microsoft’s
Based on Robertson, J. (2007,
March). Most computer attacks originate in