Welcome to the May 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. After publishing our annual Internet Security Threat Report, we’re back to take a look at the monthly trends in the threat landscape since the report was published.
Up until May, the year has been relatively quiet on the data breach front. This follows three consecutive months at the end of last year with data breaches that resulted in the exposure of over 100 million identities each month, leading us to call 2013 the year of the “mega-breach.” May sees the return of another large data breach, this time exposing over 145 million identities in one breach.
In terms of targeted attacks, spear phishing attacks per day started out fairly high, where January saw 165 attacks in an average day. However this attack rate has slowly declined as the year has progressed, currently sitting at 54 attacks per day for the month of May.
Ransomware is another area of the threat landscape where we have seen modest declines so far this year. Back in November of 2013, Ransomware activity peaked, where Symantec was blocking 861,000 potential Ransomware infections in the month. These numbers remained relatively high in the first few months of 2014, but have declined significantly in April and May, currently sitting at only 17% of the peak activity seen last November.
In other news, May saw the disclosure of four zero-day vulnerabilities, there were 66 Android malware variants for every family, and phishing, spam, and email virus rates were all up in May after drops in April.
We hope you enjoy the May Symantec Intelligence Report. You can download your copy here.