In a rather surprising statement, PandaLabs, in its 2011 Second Quarter Security Report, makes the point that there’s a challenging grey area between “Hacktivism” (LulzSec and Anonymous), and Criminality. Frankly, I don’t subscribe to this “blurry lines” view.
I see the issue in rather simpler terms – if security holes exist in critical systems which enterprise, or government, are either unwilling, or unable to address – ultimately creating a host of innocent victims – then I encourage LulzSec and Anonymous to continue their campaigns of outing non-responsive, and non-responsible organizations. I’m more than a little tired of being placed at risk due to organizational ineptness, or failure to adhere to common sense security practices.
Some key findings from Panda’s report (determined from data collected through Panda ActiveScan) include:
Every minute, 42 new malware strains were created.
Trojans constitute 70 percent of new malware followed by viruses (10 percent) and worms (8.53 percent). Surprisingly, Adware, which only represents 1.37 percent of all malware, accounted for more than 9 percent of all infections.
China, Thailand and Taiwan continue to lead infection rankings.
Top 10 least infected countries.
So, should these statistics hold any relevancy for you? Should you be preoccupied, or overly concerned, with these numbers? The answer, it seems to me, depends on how aware you are of the overallInternet security landscape, and where you fit into the following user groups.
- Those who know.
- Those who think they know.
- Those who don’t know, that they don’t know.
Hopefully, you are in that small group who can confidently say – “I know”.
Broken record time:
I’ll risk sounding like a broken record, once again, and repeat what I’ve said here numerous times –
“Controlling malware intrusion, while surfing the Net, through the use of a “virtual” environment rather than operating in a “real” environment, makes sense given the escalating level of cyber criminal activity on the Internet.”
BufferZone, is a particular effective and easy to use freeware virtualization application (perfect for casual users), which creates an isolated environment called the Virtual Zone, while you surf the Internet. You can read more about BufferZone, here.
About PandaLabs:
Since 1990, PandaLabs, Panda Security’s malware research laboratory, has been working to detect and classify malware in order to protect consumers and companies against new Internet threats.
To do so, PandaLabs uses Collective Intelligence, a cloud-based proprietary system that leverages the knowledge gathered from Panda’s user community to automatically detect, analyze and classify the more than 73,000 new malware strains that appear every day.
This automated malware classification is complemented through the work of an international team with researchers specialized each in a specific type of malware (viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware and other attacks) to provide global coverage.
The full report (PDF), is available here.
Follow Panda on Twitter and Facebook.
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