Excluding worm activity, the average organization experienced 30 attacks a week, compared with 32 attacks in weeks during the first half of last year. Notably, self-replicating mass emails showed a sharp increase in volume, accounting for eight of the top 50 reported threats in the last six months of 2002, the security company said. But more than 99% of all attacks were classified as non-severe.
Its numbers are based on statistical analysis of attacks on over 1,000 intrusion detection and firewall systems on a sample set of 400 companies in more than 30 countries, using a vulnerability database consisting of over 6,000 distinct entries.
It is the increase in blended threat targets, backdoors affecting Open Source applications, SQL database and web client vulnerabilities that Symantec believes warrant more attention as likely to lead to severe outages.
The time delay between discovery of a vulnerability and its first use in a blended threat is narrowing, the Cupertino, California-based company said. Backdoor attacks are being used to explore ways of impacting a large number of systems in a short period of time, rather targeting individual systems. The rise of attacks on web-based applications which often use databases as their back end, compromises sensitive client and corporate data.
Source: Computerwire
