81% percent of e-mail links to malware
According to recently published Websense report for the second half of 2009, 95 percent of user-generated posts on Web sites are spam or malicious, and almost 14 percent of the searches for buzz words/trending news led to malware.
Add to this the fact that 86 percent of all emails is spam and 81 percent contained a malicious link, and you might be forgiven for thinking that soon the Internet and we ourselves will be drowning in a sea of unwanted and damaging content.
More bad news is that the malware we are exposed to while surfing is located in 71 percent of the cases on legitimate sites that have been compromised, and that the average time it took for anti-virus vendors to deliver a patch once malware was identified was 46 hours! Compared to the 22 hours it took them in the first six months, they are definitely not moving in the right direction.
What can we expect in 2010?
- More and more blended threats will target computers and trap them into botnets
- Smart phones, computers running Windows 7, search engines and legitimate websites will be used by the criminals as infection vectors
- Spam and attacks on the social Web and search engines that added real-time search capabilities will increase in frequency
- Botnets will start showing a more aggressive behavior – bots will be able to detect and actively uninstall competitor bots
- Flaws in Windows 7 and IE 8 will be exploited
- SEO poisoning attacks will continue to undermine the trust in search results
- Vulnerabilities in iPhone and Android will also be taken advantage of more often, especially since mobile phones are increasingly being used for financial transactions
- As Macs gain popularity, they will the attacks that target them.
To read the report in detail, go here. NOTE: You’ll have to share some information in order to get it.