Targeted Attacks and Spear-Phishing Present Growing Problems as Overall Threats Remain Largely Stable in April

MessageLabs last week announced the results of its April Intelligence Report, as well as a deeper analysis of the threat landscape during the first quarter of 2006. Overall, threat levels remained largely stable with previous months, said the company in a release, with the U.S. continuing to play the role as the largest source of malware, spam and phishing attacks, hosting 18.1 percent of the world's compromised (zombie) computers in the first quarter of 2006 (down from a high of 44 percent in Q2 05).

"The growing trend of more targeted attacks was something we started to see in 2005 and we're continuing to see it gain momentum and also increase in sophistication. We are now also seeing this targeting move into other categories, such as with the increase in 'spear-phishing,'" said Mark Sunner, chief technology officer, MessageLabs. "While overall threat numbers remain largely stable, this only tells half the story. In reality, the cyber criminals are becoming more adept at drawing less attention to themselves, by sending out highly targeted virus and phishing attacks in smaller numbers, running smaller botnets and ultimately finding new ways to make money from victims around the world."

Spam
In April, said the company, the global ratio of spam in e-mail traffic from new and unknown bad sources was 58.5 percent (1 in 1.7), an increase of 0.7 percent on the previous month. When reviewing the overall spam rates on a quarterly basis, real spam levels have not actually changed much since the same period 12 months ago. However, certain spam is becoming easier to filter out at the Internet level as it comes from sources such as known botnets.

Viruses
In April, the global ratio of viruses in e-mail traffic from new and previously unknown bad sources destined for valid recipients, was 1 in 65.9 (1.5 percent), a decrease of 0.2 percent since March. With the exception of the Nyxem.E virus in January 2006, MessageLabs has found that large scale virus outbreaks have almost become a thing of the past, as attacks are becoming increasingly more targeted and with specific business motives. In Q1, MessageLabs also observed a rise in the number of specially crafted worms targeting the Mac OS X operating system.

Phishing
April showed a decrease of 0.05 percent in the proportion of phishing attacks compared with the previous month, with one in 359.2 e-mails being a phishing attack. However, the number of phishing attacks increased by 1.1 percent as a proportion of all e-mail-borne threats, now accounting for 15.6 percent of all malicious e-mails intercepted by MessageLabs in April. MessageLabs expects phishing to be on the rise in coming months, due to the increasingly targeted nature of phishing, known as spear-phishing.

In March, it was widely reported in the U.S. that a number of phishing scams spoofing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) were in circulation as the April 15 tax filing deadline approached. MessageLabs did see a number of these purported e-mails, however, not on the scale that seemed to be reported at the time.

Spyware
Spyware is an increasingly pervasive and growing problem. The distribution of adware online is reportedly a multi-billion dollar industry, fueling a boom in the number of botnets being created. Botnets are changing the nature of threats and enabling the bad guys to be more agile -- providing the ability to go from infecting zero computers to thousands per hour almost instantly.