A few quick but important statistics about malware (stats provided by Trend)

Tuesday, April 27th 2010 @ 8:01 PM (1 ratings)    post viewed 3248 times

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I attended an interesting event yesterday that was hosted by Trend Micro, here in Ottawa. Talks were given by Jirka Danek (Government of Canada CTO), as well as Eva Chen (one of Trend's founders) and Raimund Genes (Trend CTO). While there was some great discussion around cloud security - a key focus of Trend's business model - there were some very memorable malware statistics from Raimund and Eva that I think are important for everyone to take special notice of.

According to Trend (sorry I didn't catch the original source of these statistics from their slides):

• In a survey of 130 businesses: 100% of them had some type of active malware; 72% had evidence of botnets; 56% had data stealing malware (eg. keyloggers); and 42% had worms (self-propagating)
• Only 20 percent of malware now comes in the form of file attachments. The majority comes from links to websites.
• Over 1.5 million new malware programs are published every month
• Business IP addresses account for 25% of all malware infections (versus 75% from residential IP addresses)
• The Conficker virus (or worm) was actually a scare tactic to cause panic leading to impulse buying of fake anti-virus programs that could earn a lot of money and infect more computers
  
• Conficker is still infecting over 6 million computers
• Industrial espionage is very much alive, although we don't hear about it very often because companies rarely go public about incidents like Google did recently when they were attacked

This is the type of information we need to be constantly feeding management until they understand the need to be proactive about some of the worst threats facing our business and home computing environments.

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