The rate of unique instances of malware almost tripled in the second quarter, from 105,536 unique instances in March 2011 to 287,298 in June, Cisco found in its most recent Global Threat Report. Companies with 5,001 to 10,000 employees and companies with more than 25,000 employees experienced significantly higher malware encounters compared to other size segments, on an encounter-per-seat basis.
Attacks on SQL databases increased "significantly," Cisco said, in login attempts and injections that resulted in data breaches throughout the quarter. Cisco IPSes found that brute force login attempts grew fivefold from April 1 to June 24.
The average encounter rate in the second quarter was 335 encounters per enterprise per month, with the highest peaks in March and April at 450+, Cisco found. May and June combined, however, came close to doubling the number of encounters in January and February.
IPS event firings indicative of DoS attempts appear to have almost doubled in Q2 vs. Q1, according to Cisco's charts.
Phishing increased in the second quarter, reaching 4% of total spam volume in May. Global spam volumes, however, saw a slight decrease observed in the second quarter.
And of those large companies most susceptible, pharmaceutical/chemical was the highest risk, followed by energy/oil/gas.
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