Welcome to the July 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.
The average number of spear-phishing attacks per day has dropped back to a similar level seen in May. The .doc file type continues to be the most common attachment type used in spear-phishing attacks, followed by .exe files. Organizations with 2500+ employees were the most likely to be targeted, where non-traditional services, such as Business, Amusement, and Repair-related services, lead the Top-Ten Industries targeted, followed by Manufacturing.
The largest data breach reported in July resulted in the exposure of 900,000 identities. Hackers continue to be responsible for 49 percent of data breaches over the last 12 months, most often exposing real names, government ID numbers, such as Social Security numbers, and home addresses in the data breaches.
W32.Sality and W32.Ramnit variants continue to dominate the top-ten malware list. The most common OSX threat seen was OSX.RSPlug.A, making up 38 percent of all OSX malware found on OSX Endpoints.
There were 575 vulnerabilities disclosed during the month of July, though no zero-day vulnerabilities were discovered. Internet Explorer has reported the most browser vulnerabilities in the last 12 months, while Oracle’s Java reported the most plug-in vulnerabilities over the same time period.
There were four Android malware families discovered in June. Of the mobile threats discovered in the last 12 months, 24 percent steal information from the device and 22 percent track the device’s user. In terms of social networking scams, 63 percent were fake offerings and 27 percent were manually shared scams.
Finally, the phishing rate was down in July, at one in 1,299 emails, down from one in 496 emails in June. The global spam rate was 63.7 percent for the month of July, one out of every 351 emails contained a virus, and of the email traffic in the month of July, 7.9 percent contained a malicious URL.
We hope you enjoy the July Symantec Intelligence Report. You can download your copy here.