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Enterprise Security Risks, Part 1: By the Numbers

By Dennis McCafferty on 2010-09-02


In this first installment of our two-part series we look at enterprise security risks for which CIOs should be increasingly on guard. In Part Two , we look at the trends behind the numbers. These figures are excerpted from a mid-year enterprise risk report from IBM, which shows that vulnerability disclosures are up significantly compared to last year. Many of these incidents cannot be mitigated with a patch because none is available. Remote attacks – those which can be launched without prior access to an enterprise system – are now the most popular option for hackers. The complete research document, the IBM Security X-Force 2010 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report , is the result of ongoing, in-depth analysis by the X-Force Research team. The researchers cull facts from a database of more than 50,000 computer-security vulnerabilities and millions of intrusion events on tens of thousands of managed network sensors worldwide, as well as their Web crawler, spam collectors and other intelligence sources.

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4,396 new vulnerabilities were detected by the IBM X-Force Research and Development Team in first-half 2010 – a 36 percent increase over the same time period last year.

55 percent of those vulnerabilities had no vendor-supplied patch at the end of the research period.

20 percent of all disclosed vulnerabilities in first-half 2010 came from the top ten IT vendors.

94 percent of all vulnerability disclosures in first-half 2010 were remotely exploitable, meaning local access to the system is not required. That's up from 85 percent in 2006.

52 percent of vulnerabilities are “Gain Access” exploitations, meaning the attacker commands complete control over a system to possibly steal data, manipulate the system and/or launch attacks within.

55 percent of vulnerabilities disclosed are Web-application based.

88 percent of all vulnerabilities affected Web-application plug-ins in first-half 2010, as opposed to the Web-app platform itself.

Pornography/sex Web sites made up 33 percent of all Web sites hosting 10 or more malicious links in first-half of 2010 – a clear indication that CIOs must be pro-active when it comes to effective filtering of these sites in the workplace.

Gambling sites made up 28 percent of all Web sites hosting 10 or more malicious links in first-half of 2010.

A vast majority (90 percent) of spam is URL-based, meaning the spammer intends for the receiver to click on a URL to view the spam contents.

9.7 percent of all spam e-mails came from computers that were geographically located in the U.S. in first-half 2010.

8.4 percent of all spam emails came from computer networks in Brazil.

Other top geographic locations for spam include: India (8.1 percent) Russia (5.3 percent) Vietnam (4.6 percent) South Korea (4.1 percent)

The top nation for URL-based spam?China, which accounted for 37.5 percent of such emails.

Other top nations for URL-based spam include: United States (16.6 percent) South Korea (8.9 percent) Moldova (4.7 percent) Russia (3.4 percent)

Most popular spam subject line?“You have a new personal message,” which accounts for .5 percent of spam subject lines.

Other popular spam subject lines include: Those advertising replica watches (.44 percent) Sales on Pfizer (.4 percent) News on MySpace (.35 percent) Important notices about Google Apps browser support (.35 percent).

Most popular phishing subject line?“Security Alert – Verification of Your Current Details,” which accounted for 15.75 percent of phishing subject lines in first-half 2010.

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