Kaspersky Reports on Information Security Threats in the First Quarter of 2010

This report was compiled on the basis of data obtained and processed using the Kaspersky Security Network (KSN). KSN is one of the most important innovations in personal products and is currently in the final stages of development. Once completed, it will become an integral feature of Kaspersky Lab's corporate product range.  

The Quarter in Review

• A total of 327,598,028 attempts to infect users’ computers in different countries around the world were recorded — that's 26.8% more than in the previous quarter.


• The vector of attack employed by the cybercriminals is changing: the percentage of attacks that targeted Chinese users dropped by 13%.


• The most dominant malware family on the Internet utilizes HTML code or scripts that the cybercriminals primarily use to infect legitimate sites.


• A total of 119,674,973 malicious host servers were identified. The US and Russia were both ahead of China in terms of the number of malicious hosting servers.


• Detected vulnerabilities increased by 6.9% from the previous quarter. Six of the ten most common vulnerabilities found were in Microsoft products.


• The number of exploits increased 21.3%. Roughly fifty percent of all exploits take advantage of vulnerabilities in Adobe programs due to the fact that Adobe’s programs are widespread and can be run on a number of different platforms.


• Almost any device that synchronizes with a computer is used by the cybercriminals as a carrier of malware these days. The most unusual of which has so far been a USB charger for Energizer batteries.