Spear-phishing stats reveal unexplained holiday spikes

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/021412-fireeye-holiday-spikes-256009.html

By Ellen Messmer
Network World
February 14, 2012

While phishing attempts against workplace email accounts drop 
precipitously on Christmas and New Year's Day, as might be expected, 
such attacks spike dramatically on other holidays, says a report from a 
security firm. Why is not clear.

Attackers seem to be hard at work on U.S. holidays, including 
Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day and Thanksgiving when attack 
levels spike strongly upward, according to FireEye's "Advanced Threat 
Report - 2011" which summarizes patterns of malware-based attacks seen 
against its customers during the course of last year. But Christmas and 
New Year's represents the opposite, when "attack levels dropped off well 
below the average," the report says. There's only speculation that 
"there are significantly fewer employees working during those holidays, 
so there are fewer opportunities for targeted users to actually open 
malicious attachments."

The worst holiday for phishing email seems to be Labor Day, when 
malicious email increased 1,353% over the average. Columbus Day was 
second, when phishing rates jumped 549%. FireEye speculates that "spear 
phishing attacks increase when enterprise security operations centers 
are lightly staffed or understaffed, particularly during holidays."

In other efforts to decipher the meaning of patterns of malicious 
activity spotted on customer networks, FireEye also pointed out that of 
the thousands of malware families, the top 50 generated 80% of 
successful malware infections. FireEye cited the toolkit called 
Blackhole as a prominent criminally used toolkit in 2011 to "drop" 
malware on vulnerable machines.

[...]


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