Spam Globally Declines but Malware Increases

Bangalore: Cyber threats and anti-social activities have been spreading like wild fire in the recent years and have brought a rage among the users. This has been a major cause of concern for the IT industry in terms of security though global spam volumes continued to decline throughout in the past year, but web malware encounters appear to be growing steadily, according to new research from Cisco as reported by Rachel King in zdnet.com

Enterprise users experienced an average of 339 malware encounters online per month during the fourth quarter of 2011 says the Cisco 4Q11 Global Threat Report which covered the period between October 1 and December 31, 2011. However the issue here is the serious threat involved i.e. 33 percent of those attacks were using zero-day malware, which were not detectable by “traditional signature-based methodologies at the time of encounter.”

Compared to a monthly average of 14,217 in 2010 at an average of 20,141 unique web malware hosts were identified encountering per month in 2011 which was traced by Cisco and the Denial-of-service incidents also increased faintly over the course of the fourth quarter, whereas the number of SQL injection signature events remained stable.

The average per month in 2011 was 362 web malware encounters, and the peak amounts were found in September and October at 698 and 697 encounters on average per enterprise, respectively.

Another branch of Cisco also released a report that revealed nearly half of IT managers and executives polled globally across six leading economies said they would never let employees bring their own devices to work  mainly due to security issues.