Last month, McAfee Labs released their Q1 Threats Report, which included their most detailed breakout to date of network attacks. At the top of the list were their key findings on the United States as once again the primary source of global cyber attacks.
According to the Labs, just a few years ago, most of our customers never thought to ask where an attack came from, or who was responsible. Today we hear these queries on a regular basis, but it’s difficult to answer them accurately. Most attack sourcing relies heavily on IP addresses and basic geographic functions, which are no more than a start, because location and IP address information does not imply identity.
As in Q4 of 2011, the leading network threats were again remote procedure call and SQL injection attacks. Cross-site scripting threats dropped quite a bit, to 8 percent from 19 percent last quarter.
For SQL injection attacks, the United States took the top spot as the source of attacks as well as the targets.
This quarter, McAfee Labs also added a view of top network botnet detections. The clear leader was Mariposa, a financial botnet that steals credit card and banking data.
Finally, the United States also topped another of our network lists. Almost half of the new botnet control servers detected by McAfee Global Threat Intelligence resided in the United States. The US also houses the location point for the vast majority of new malicious websites, with an average of 9,000 new bad sites recorded per day.
Overall, the Q1 Threats Report exposed an increase in malware across all platforms, reaching its highest levels in four years. Beyond network security, mobile malware for Android also increased dramatically, with malware for Mac also on the rise and poised to hit the 100 million mark within the year.
For more information on McAfee Labs’ findings, you can read the full Q1 report here. And as always, be sure to follow us on Twitter at @McAfeeBusiness for the latest industry news, resources and events.
Also, to learn more about how McAfee Network Security Platform protects against these top attack types and more, visit www.mcafee.com/networksecurity.
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