August 3, 2005

IBM finds hackers focussed on specific areas

by brian_turner

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A worldwide survey by IBM revealed that hackers are increasingly targeting their attacks at specific organisations, especially government departments, financial services, manufacturing and healthcare companies. There were 237 million security attacks in the first half of 2005 and 137 million were aimed at these four areas.

Internet criminals are focusing on fraud, identity theft and extortion, while spam is decreasing. The ratio of spam to legitimate e-mail dropped from 83% in January to 67% in June.

IBM’s Global Business Security Index recorded 35 million phishing attacks in the first half of the year.

Phishing is the fraudulent acquisition of confidential information via a bogus e-mail. Targeted and co-ordinated attacks on a specific organisation, a technique known as spear phishing, increased more than ten-fold since January.

IBMâ€™s study also showed an increase in virus attacks. In January an average of one in every 52 e-mails was infected. This increased to one in every 28 by June. Most attacks came from the US, with a total of 12 million over the six-month period looked at. New Zealand was in second place, with 1.2 million attacks, followed by China with one million.

John Lutz, general manger of the Financial Services Sector of IBM, said: “To protect their critical data, infrastructure, brands and money IBM advises businesses to rethink how they protect their operations, business processes and governance structures”.

The IBM Global Business Security Index Report is issued monthly. It assesses potential network security threats based on data collected by 3,000 worldwide security experts and thousands of monitored devices.

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