A report by Kaspersky Lab has found that about 40% of the IT threats in the first quarter of 2013 targeted vulnerabilities in Adobe products.
Kaspersky Lab said that 1,345,570,352 threats were detected and neutralised in Q1 and a total of 22,750 new modifications of malicious programmes targeting mobile devices were found.
According to the report, about 60% of all malicious hosts are located in three countries that include the US, Russia, and the Netherlands.
Kaspersky Lab said at the very beginning of the year it published a report with the results of a study on the global cyber espionage operation known as Red October.
In February, a new malicious programme, dubbed MiniDuke, was discovered that penetrated systems using a 0-day vulnerability in Adobe Reader (CVE-2013-0640).
Mandiant published a PDF report on the attacks launched by a certain group of Chinese hackers going by the name of APT1 in February this year.
Kaspersky Lab said in March that information was published about the latest in a line of complex attacks targeting high-ranking politicians and human rights advocates in the CIS and Eastern Europe.
Symantec has published a study on a newly identified old version of Stuxnet, dubbed Stuxnet 0.5, which turned out to be the earliest known modification of the worm, and was active between 2007 and 2009.
Kaspersky Lab senior malware analyst Dennis Maslennikov said Q1 brought a huge number of major incidents related to cyber espionage and cyber-weapons and incidents that require months of relentless investigation are relatively rare in the antivirus industry.
"Even rarer are events that remain relevant three years after they take place — like the detection of Stuxnet, for example," Maslennikov said.
"Although this worm has been studied by numerous antivirus vendors, there are still lots of modules that have only been examined briefly, if at all."
Maslennikov noted that Q1 also saw more targeted attacks against Tibetan and Uyghur activists.
"The attackers appeared to be using everything at their disposal to achieve their goals, and users of Mac OS X, Windows, and Android were subjected to attacks."
