Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report

Symantec has just released its twice-yearly Internet Security Threat Report. This contains plenty of interesting data from the perspective of Symantec's Security Response team. Well, "interesting" if you're interested in that sort of thing...

Here are some highlights (percentage changes are over a six month period):

• About half of identity thefts are caused by loss or theft of laptops and other hardware containing personal data
• Denial of Service attacks are down about 20%
• Botnet activity is up by about 10% (in terms of number of active zombies)
  • China hosted about one quarter of these zombies -- more than any other single country
  • The U.S. hosted about 40% of the botnet command-and-control nodes
• New vulnerabilities (e.g. in Windows or Web applications) were up about 10%
  • Operating system vendors are taking "longer" to patch vulnerabilities (no quantitative data disclosed)
• The Stration family of worms was the most widely-reported
• Email is still the most-used vector for propagating viruses and other malware -- at about 75%
• Phishing is up 5% in terms of numbers of campaigns, and about 20% in terms of volume
  • Phishing attacks are more likely to be sent on a weekday than at the weekend
• Stock kiting and other financial services spam represented about a third of all spam