Providing IT Security Services Not for Faint of Heart

Channel Insider content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. View our editorial policy here.

IT Security

Every minute a host accesses a malicious Website, and every 24 hours a host is infected by a bot. What’s more, 33% of hosts are not running the latest software versions.

73% of organizations are infected by at least one bot; 49% have seven or more infected hosts. Sites infected by more than 22 infected hosts increased 200%. Every three minutes, a bot communicates with its command-and-control center.

On average, 77% of bots are active for more than four weeks.

There was a 144% increase in new types of malware from 2012 to 2013. Every 10 minutes an unknown piece of malware is being downloaded. On average, 2.2 pieces of malware hit an organization per hour.

33% of organizations have downloaded at least one file infected with unknown malware, of which 35% of those files are PDFs. 58% of organizations download a file loaded with malware every two hours or less.

Analysis of detections in 2013 showed that the majority of unknown malware was targeted at customers via email, most often embedded in attachments.

Less than 10% of antivirus software engines can detect unknown malware, and 18% of hosts studied did not have the latest signatures for antivirus solutions.

Every nine minutes, a high-risk application is being used, and every 49 minutes, sensitive data is being sent outside the organization. 63% of organizations, for example, have BitTorrent on their networks and 85% have Dropbox.

Databases show a decrease in the number of reported vulnerabilities to 5,191 for the year, a modest 2% year-over-year change from 2012, including a 9% drop in the number of “critical” vulnerabilities reported.

Oracle led all vendors in disclosures, with 496; followed by Cisco, with 433; IBM, with 394; and Microsoft, with 345.

14% of the endpoints analyzed did not have the latest Microsoft Windows service packs; 33% of all enterprise endpoints did not have the current versions for client software.

Of the enterprise endpoints analyzed, a full 38% were configured with local administrator permissions, enabling malware to run in the system (root) context when it executes.

Despite endpoint weaknesses, servers were still the primary target by a margin of 2:1.

Code execution tops the list, at 51%; followed by memory corruption, at 47%; and buffer overflow, at 36%.

Attackers were employing automated mechanisms for creating evasive, unknown malware on a large scale and now target organizations through global coordinated campaigns.

88% of organizations experienced at least one potential data loss incident.