The Hindu Business Line : `Blended worms are more potent, faster'

BLENDED threats — a potent cocktail of attack mechanisms, increased vulnerabilities targeting Windows components, and escalating discovery of severe information systems vulnerabilities pose a significant security issue for companies in the coming year, according to an Internet Security threat report by security software vendor, Symantec.

Blended threats made up 54 per cent of the top 10 malicious code submissions over the last six months of 2003, says the biannual report. These threats have caused widespread damage more quickly than ever before due to increased propagation speed, aided in part by improved bandwidth and decreased latency, says Mr Ambarish Deshpande, Head-Channel and Consumer Sales.

One of the most `successful' worms, Blaster, targeted a vulnerability in core Windows components. Threats targeting these components are more widespread than that from the previous network-based worms targeting server software, resulting in a much higher density of vulnerable systems, according to the report.

The number of new vulnerabilities discovered has levelled off, but newly discovered vulnerabilities are more severe, rated as such based on their impact, remote exploitability, authentication and availability. In addition, the period of time between the announcement of a vulnerability and the release of an associated exploit is shrinking. These trends suggest that `zero-day' threats may be imminent - within hours of the vulnerability being announced, in fact. Such threats target vulnerabilities before they are announced and patches are made available, making prevention and containment extremely challenging, says Mr Deshpande.

In the first half of 2003, only one sixth of the companies analysed by Symantec's system reported a serious security breach. In the second half of the year, half of the companies reported a serious breach. This rise is largely the result of increasingly `successful' worms, which remain the most common source of attack activity. Moreover, almost one third of all attacking systems targeted the vulnerability exploited by the Blaster worm.