Symantec in its recent Internet Security Report has observed that malicious code activity globally, continued to grow at a record pace throughout 2008, primarily targeting confidential information of computer users. The report also observed that India saw a substantial increase in its proportion of malicious activity having the third highest volume of malicious activity accounting to 10 percent of the regional total.

Symantec created more than 1.6 million new malicious code signatures in 2008 which equates to more than 60 percent of the total malicious code signatures ever created by the company, as a response to the rapidly increasing volume and proliferation of new malicious code threats.  These signatures helped Symantec block an estimated average of more than 245 million attempted malicious code attacks across the globe each month during 2008.

The report is derived from data collected by millions of Internet sensors, first-hand research, and active monitoring of hacker communications, and provides a global view of the state of Internet security. The study period for the ISTR XIV covers January 2008 to December 2008. It noted that Web surfing remained the primary source of new infections in 2008, and attackers are relying more on customized malicious code toolkits to develop and distribute their threats.

Computers from the United States and China were observed to be the leading source of Web-based attacks targeting India, accounting for 84 percent and 5 percent respectively.

“Due to a rapidly growing Internet infrastructure, a burgeoning broadband population and rampant software piracy, India is expected to witness increased malicious activities,” said Vishal Dhupar, managing director, Symantec India.  “Unless enterprises improve security protocols and measures to counter malicious activities, India will continue to be a soft target of Internet threats.”

The report estimates that India had an average of 836 bots per day during 2008 and there were 1,03,812 distinct bot-infected computers observed in the country during the period, an increase of nearly 250 percent from the previous Internet Security Threat Report. Amongst the cities in India with the highest number of bot-infected computers, Mumbai figured at the top with 37 percent followed by Chennai at 24 percent and Delhi at 7 percent. Cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, Calcutta, Surat, Ahmadabad, Cochin and Pune too had a sizeable share of bot-infected computers.

In the APJ region, the report ranked India first on worms and viruses attacks prevalence chart with 9 of the top 10 mal-codes found in India consisting of worms (55 percent) and viruses (15 percent) that disabled security related processes, downloaded additional threats and stole confidential information.

It also observed that 65 percent of worms and viruses in Indian enterprises are propagated through the File Sharing/Executables mechanism indicating that endpoint security and policy are still missing in many organizations as this level of security protection would have allowed IT administrators to scan removable drives for threats.

Over the past year, Symantec has observed a 192 percent increase in spam detected across the Internet as a whole, from 119.6 billion messages in 2007 to 349.6 billion in 2008. The report found that phishing continued to grow in 2008 by 66 percent over 2007 with, 55,389 detected phishing Web site hosts.