Things are worse

We put everyone and their gramma into this World Wide Web rife with deceivers, liars, scammers, stalkers and others who have learned just how easy it is to trick technology - and its users - into doing their bidding. Just read Symantec's statistics for second half of '06:

23 percent increase in Trojan horses (which vendors are having a hard time getting control of.) Trojans made up 45 percent of the top 50 malicious code samples collected in Symantec's global malicious code traps. Trojan horses pretend to be friendly applications, like a driver to run an audio file. Instead, they open a door on the computer to load other malware and set up commands between bots and their controllers.

12 documented zero days, which are just the tip of the iceberg, given the criminal underground wants to keep these things quiet so as to continue exploiting the exposure before detection, says Dean Turner, senior manager in Symantec Security Response, during a phone call yesterday.

6 million bot-infected computers, a 29 percent increase. Botware takes over computers and uses their Internet connections and processing power to run scams, spams and to send out their financial identity information to strangers.

What's troubling to Turner is the combination of malicious events that are coming together all at once.

"Bot-infected computers were up 29 percent, while controllers are down 25 percent," he says. "That suggests more organization and structuring of the criminal underground."

The bad guys are also targeting third party applications, which are not particularly built and tested well for security.

Overall, Turner says, threats to enterprise and individual computers has risen nearly 300 percent since 2005.

Can anybody say "Duck and Cover?"

• Security
• malware
• online crime
• online fraud