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p. 4 Symantec Corporation Internet Security Threat Report 2013 :: Volume 18 Executive Summary Internet security threats are a growing and unique challenge to governments and public sector organizations. First, they must protect themselves against the same threats as the business sector: malware, data theft, vandalism, and hacktivism. Then they are targets in their own right for persistent attacks, espionage, and potentially even cyber attacks. Finally, government bodies, in collaboration with the private sector, have a responsibility to protect citizens, the economy, and national infrastructure against attack by hostile governments and non-state actors such as terrorist groups, often in collaboration with the private sector. In a recent speech to business executives, 1 the U.S. Secretary of Defense summarized the threat in powerful terms: “I know that when people think of cybersecurity today, they worry about hackers and criminals who prowl the Internet, steal people’s identities, steal sensitive business information, steal even national security secrets. Those threats are real and they exist today. But the even greater danger – the greater danger facing us in cyberspace goes beyond crime and it goes beyond harassment. A cyber attack perpetrated by nation states [and] violent extremists groups could be as destructive as the terrorist attack on 9/11. Such a destructive cyberterrorist attack could virtually paralyze the nation.” The most important trends in 2012 were: Cyberespionage and Targeted Attacks on the Rise We saw a 42 percent increase in targeted attacks with more attacks aimed at smaller businesses, perhaps using them as a Trojan horse into their customers. This suggests that organizations need to pay attention to the security of their entire supplier ecosystem as well as their own systems. Attackers focus their attacks on junior employees just as much (if not more) as they do on executives and VIPs, often because their accounts are less well protected. Attackers continued to develop increasingly sophisticated ways to infiltrate protected systems. For example, they started using watering hole attacks, a technique where malware on infected third-party websites is used to target employees who might visit those websites. In this type of attack, attackers might infect lobby groups or policy think tanks to infect government workers who might browse their sites. Specialist Information Brokers It looks increasingly likely that specialist information brokerage businesses are the hired guns of cyberespionage. The scope and scale of attacks suggest that well-resourced organizations are able to attack dozens of targets simultaneously and continuously research new zero-day attacks and attack software. Attackers Moving Away from Email Spam rates are down 29 percent, phishing attempts are down to one in 608 emails, and one in 291 emails contains a virus. While these attacks are in relative decline, social media is a new and growing battlefield. On the face of it, social networking doesn’t appear to be a threat for the public sector but in reality it gives attackers a treasure trove of personal information for identity theft and targeted attacks. It’s also a new way to install malware on people’s computers.
p. 5 Symantec Corporation Internet Security Threat Report 2013 :: Volume 18 Ill-protected Websites Put Us at Risk We saw a threefold increase in the number of Web-based attacks. Online criminals are using different techniques to infect legitimate websites, including attack toolkits and malvertising. A line or two of code on a Web page can be very difficult to detect and it can infect thousands of visitors a day. Websites that are not well protected put other Web users at risk. As with watering hole attacks, the vulnerability of websites provides attackers with new and rapidly evolving ways to target individuals and organizations. Zero-day Vulnerabilities There were more zero-day vulnerabilities found actively being exploited in the wild than in years past. These are cases where an attack exploits a previously unknown vulnerability, as opposed to after a patch is made available by the vendor. While there were 8 zero-day vulnerabilities discovered in 2011, 14 were found in 2012. The rise of zero-day attacks and polymorphic malware renders moot any defense based purely on virus signature recognition; organizations need multi-layered defenses. Mac Attacks 2012 was the end of the era in which Mac® computer users could plausibly claim immunity from malware. At least 600,000 Mac users were infected with the Flashback threat via a Java vulnerability. Having said that, beyond this one prevalent threat, Mac threats do not appear to have increased to any great extent. While the number of unique threats targeted at the Mac are up, only about 2.5 percent of the threats targeted Mac OS; the rest targeted Windows. Data Breaches Gain Focus At first glance, the numbers for data breaches paint a picture of an attack method in decline: there were fewer high-profile attacks, and the average number of identities exposed is down significantly. Where there were 1.1 million identities exposed per breach in 2011, this number decreased by nearly half, to 604,826 in 2012. These numbers are likely down due to a concerted effort by hacker groups Anonymous and LULZSec to publicize hacks during 2011—something that was not seen to the same extent in 2012. However, the global median is up, from 2,400 to 8,350 identities stolen per breach. Government agencies are particularly attractive targets for data thieves because they often hold valuable intellectual property (for example, patent offices) or personal information (for example, tax offices). The U.S. government has been warning public sector organizations for several years about the whole spectrum of Internet security threats. More recently, other governments have started addressing the issue. Governments around the world are waking up to the need to educate their constituents about security and devote resources to improving defenses. Failure threatens more than a “cyber Pearl Harbor”; it could mean a loss of economic competitiveness and long-term economic decline.
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