Report: Nearly 2x more cyber vulnerabilities exploited in January

Technology

Report: Nearly 2x more cyber vulnerabilities exploited in January

Cyber-crooks jacked-up their attempts to hack into systems last month. The monthly threat landscape report from Fortinet says hackers exploited close to twice as...

Federal News Network Staff

February 4, 2011 3:50 pm

< a min read

Cyber-crooks jacked-up their attempts to hack into systems last month.

The monthly threat landscape report from Fortinet says hackers exploited close to twice as many vulnerabilities as usual in January. A breakdown in InfoSecurity says hackers took advantage of 61 percent of new vulnerabilities – compared to a typical exploitation rate of between 30 and 40 percent.

Fortinet’s researchers say new exploit codes are readily available. And since not everyone has up-to-date signatures or patches that’s leaving a lot of systems vulnerable.

The report says the top three malware threats in January were the Feebs, Buzus, and Virut trojans. Feebs is a mass mailer that uses Javascript to infect systems. Buzus is often found in Spam sending infected attachments of itself.

Fortinet says it saw another big decline in SPAM rates in late December and early January. But those rates have since started to go back up again.

This story is part of Federal News Radio’s daily Cybersecurity Update brought to you by Tripwire. For more cybersecurity news, click here.