Sep 25, 2006, 17:10 GMT
San Francisco - Computer hackers are increasingly focusing their dark skills on home computers and financial services networks as they step up their efforts to use the Internet for fraud, security software company Symantec Corp. said Monday.
The maker of products such as Norton Anti-Virus said in its tenth biannual Internet security report that hackers were shifting their focus to home users as improved security made corporate networks more difficult to penetrate.
'Attackers see end users as the weakest link in the security chain and are constantly targeting them in an effort to profit,' Symantec executive Arthur Wong. If the trend continues, the company said, the attacks on consumers and the institutions that hold their money could lead to an 'erosion of confidence in online banking and in online purchases.'
While vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Internet Explorer still enabled most of the attacks, Symantec researchers found that the open source browser Firefox actually had the most vulnerabilities at 47 (compared to 17 in the last reporting period), 38 in Microsoft Internet Explorer (compared to 25), and 12 in Apple Safari (compared to six).
Hackers are also stepping up the sophistication of their attacks, the report said. After relying on email for many years, hackers now increasingly use tainted web sites to surreptitiously install malicious software on consumers' computers, where it is used to glean sensitive data like credit-card numbers and bank-account information to use in fraud schemes.
At the same time the use of spam has increased, with unwanted mass-mailed messages now accounting for 54 per cent of all email traffic - up 4 per cent from six months earlier. Also, 'phishing' emails, which are used in identity-theft scams, continued to expand with their numbers rising to 157,477 different phishing messages, up 81 per cent from six months earlier.
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