TwistedMetal

"Symantec's semi-annual Internet Security Threat report, released this week, paints a picture of an increasingly threatening Internet. But unlike previous reports, there seems to be little in the way of good news.

In the first half of the year, one in six companies reported a serious security breach, a number that increased to one in two in the second half. August, which will go down in history in malware folklore, had a nasty 12-day period when Blaster, Welchia, and SoBig.F infected millions of machines worldwide and caused billions of dollars in damage.

The second half of the year also saw a prodigious increase in the number of Win32 viruses and worms--1702 released in the second half versus 687 in the first.

Tony Vincent, lead global security architect with Symantec, says some of the dramatic increase seen in reported security breaches could be due to one bad month. "In the front half of the year we didn't have the big gang of three that we had in August," he says. "That was very much a new thing."

Regardless, Vincent says there is also some concern with what he calls the "shrinking time to market"--Blaster was released only 26 days after the vulnerability became public--and the trend of malware writers to simply use backdoors left by other worms, viruses, or vulnerability exploits."

Full article: PCWorld