90 PERCENT OF WORLDWIDE EMAIL IS SPAM CISCO REPORT

As long as cyber crime groups pursuing profiteering through the Internet are improving their skills so as to steal data from businesses, employees and consumers their online attacks are getting more sophisticated and harder to oppose, as noted in the 2008 edition of the Cisco Annual Security Report released this week. In its annual edition Cisco points out to the top security threats of the year providing recommendations on how to protect networks against attacks.

This year the overall number of disclosed vulnerabilities grew 11.5% above 2007. Cisco notes that vulnerabilities in virtualization technology nearly tripled from 35 to 103 on a year-over-year basis. Attacks are becoming increasingly blended, cross-vector and targeted. Threats coming from legitimate domains rose 90% which is nearly double of what was observed a year ago. Meantime, malware infiltrated via e-mail attachments is decreasing in number. Within the period of the last two years the number of attachment-based attacks dropped 50% as compared with the previous two years of 2005 and 2006.

Cisco warned against some specific threats that flooded the web space reporting that the number of spam messages sent daily makes up for 200 billion constituting thus 90% of the worldwide e-mail. While targeted spear-phishing represents about 1 percent of all phishing attacks, it is expected to become more prevalent as criminals personalize spam and make messages appear more credible. The growing danger is also being posed by botnets which are heavily deployed today by cyber criminals. Multiple legitimate web sites were infected this year with IFrames, malicious code injected by botnets that redirect visitors to malware-downloading sites. The use of social engineering to entice victims to open a file or click links continues to grow. More online criminals are using real e-mail accounts with large, legitimate Web mail providers to send spam.