Internet Security Threat Report by Symantec reveals increase in internet crimes aimed at acquiring financial information

• More than half of recent major Internet threats are targeting personal information, a sign that financial gain is behind the attacks, IT security firm Symantec said Monday.
• While releasing its latest Internet Security Threat Report, Symantec said that identity theft features were found in 54 percent of the top 50 malicious codes detected between July and December last year, marking an increase on the 36 percent found during the same period in year 2003.
• This represents a clear trend that attackers have gone from seeking fame to seeking fortune, according to Oliver Friedrichs, senior manager with Symantec Security Response.
• Computers are increasingly coming under attack from Trojan horses, worms and viruses that attempt to glean users' cached log-on data and passwords to financial information, and this trend is not likely to slow down soon, he noted.
• Phishing scams, which rely on social engineering to dupe people into providing sensitive financial and confidential information, use fake e-mails and Web sites that look like legitimate sites.
• Regulatory intervention and technological means of checking thelegitimacy of e-mails have been suggested as methods of reducing identity threat attacks.
• But regulations are somewhat limited, because the individuals behind the scams are already breaking the law and show an apparent disregard to rules and regulations, according to Friedrichs.
• He added that technology, in its current form, is also hard-pressed to combat phishing e-mails and identity threat attacks.
• Windows 32 viruses and worms pose a serious threat to the security and integrity of the computing community due to the widespread deployment of Microsoft Windows operating systems, the study showed.
• From last July to December, Symantec reported more than 7,360 new Windows 32 virus and worm variants.