Welcome to the November edition of the Symantec Intelligence report. Symantec Intelligence aims to provide the latest analysis of cyber security threats, trends, and insights concerning malware, spam, and other potentially harmful business risks.
November saw another increase in the number of targeted attacks. While these numbers are up slightly compared to October, they’re almost double the number of targeted attacks during the same month in 2012, though still much lower than their peaks this summer.
This month we saw another large data breach reported, where 42 million identities were exposed as a result. However, the breach apparently took place in January, resulting in an increase in overall numbers for the beginning of this year.
It appears that the email virus rate increased in November, where one in 235 emails contained a malicious attachment. This is up from one in 437 emails last month, and the highest rate we’ve seen since November 2012. In terms of industries most likely to encounter malicious emails, the Public Sector tops the list at one in 62 emails. The United Kingdom tops both the source and destinations locations for the month.
In other news, spam rates dropped 5.5 percentage points to 62.2 percent of email, fake offerings still top the list of social media attacks at 82 percent, 36 percent of all malicious mobile apps track user activity, and 438 new vulnerabilities were disclosed during the month.
We hope you enjoy the November Symantec Intelligence Report. You can download your copy here.