6,110 DDoS Attacks a Day, According to Symantec

Symantec just released Volume X of it's "Internet Security Threat Report." This report, quite an interesting and sobering document, covers threat activity from January 1 through the end of June, 2006. In my opinion, the scariest facets of online crime are the significant rise in targeted attacks vs. blanket attacks.

As online security vendors become more intelligent and new technologies are deployed, mass phishing attacks and scams are being eliminated. These technologies have created an "arms race" between vendors and online bad guys. This arms raise has seen an increase in attacks on exploits of client side application such as web-browsers.

These so called zero-day exploits continue to gain attention, and are highlighted within this report. As I've previously said (in older articles), zero-day exploits are not the truly scary threats that everyone is making them out to be. The older, well-known threats, that go unpatched, are truly what keeps me up at night.

This report, available here shows a significant increase in phishing attacks and emails. It also demonstrates that hackers are resorting to social engineering efforts more and more frequently. This piece of information again leads me to state my belief that educating your customers will do more to thwart online scams then any stand-alone security technology.

If you would like more information on how to stay safe online, take a look at this piece I wrote a few months back.