Java vulnerabilities and Adobe vulnerabilities in Flash are being increasingly targeted by cyber criminals, says a new report by Web security company M86 Security.
The company said that the main reasons why the two platforms have become targets are popularity and lack of prompt patches.
M86 said six of the top 10 most-exploited vulnerabilities in the first half of 2011 were in Adobe products, a 100% rise compared to figures for the same period in 2010.
"As with Flash and Acrobat, Java-based vulnerabilities are of concern due to the universal use of this technology and the lack of updating or patching for many Java installations," the report said.
M86 Security’s latest biannual report also reveals that although spam volumes have declined by about a third since the closure of Spamit.com and takedown of the Rustock botnet, spam remains a problem for most organisations.
The report said that spam accounts for 77% of all email on the Internet. It added that the proportion of spam containing malicious attachments has grown three times to 3%.
Cybercriminals continue to experiment with combined attacks, said the report, adding that there has been an increase in phishing attacks that include an HTML attachment, which is used to bypass anti-spam and anti-phishing filters in the browser.
Facebook scams surged in the first half of 2011, noted the report.
Geographically, the US remained at the top of the list of locations where malicious code is hosted. China saw its share of malicious code double, up from 6.4% in the second half of 2010 to 12.7% in the first half of 2011, said the report.
The report also predicts that the UK looks primed to be the next target, as the 2012 Olympic Games will be hosted there.
It draws a correlation from the drop in malware hosts in South Africa, where since hosting the 2010 FIFA World Cup, South Africa registered malicious code hosts of only 0.3% in the first half of 2011, down from a high of 5.28% in the second half of 2010.
M86 said, "Our analysis showed an increase already starting: the UK share rose from 3.34% in the second half of 2010, up to 5.19% in the first half of 2011. We believe that this trend will continue as we get closer to the event [Olympic Games] in 2012."
