Sophos Security Threat Report 2009

The report reveals that more malware is hosted on U.S. Web sites (37%) and more spam is relayed from American computers (17.5%), than any other country. As evidence, when an American Internet company, accused of collaborating with spammers and hackers, was disconnected from the Net in November, there was a 75% percent drop in spam.

Sophos’s research conveys that in 2008 criminal organisations tripled their attacks against innocent Web sites, injecting malicious code in order to infect visiting users.
The report also reveals a rise in hackers spamming out malicious attachments, designed to endanger equipment in order to steal identities and resources. By the end of 2008, Sophos was tracking five times more malicious attacks arriving through files attached to emails than at the beginning of the year.
For more information, including statistics on e-mail threats, detection techniques and spam-relaying countries, please download the 2009 Sophos Security Threat Report 2009.