By Katya, Grace, Lachlan, Sairus and Eric!

• Symantec's Government Internet Security Threat
Report states that the U.S. is the top country for overall malicious activity in 2008.
• It’s also ranked first for malicious code, phishing website hosts, and originating attacks.
• Attacks on government computer networks in
U.S. that resulted in compromised or stolen information increased by 40 percent from 2007 to 2008.

• In July 2009, an average of 89 percent of all email messages were spam!
• It’s clear that the effects of malicious cyber attacks affect everyone!
• If the internet is to become a safer place, we must understand the trends and developments taking place in the internet threat landscape and maintain online security best practices.

Types of Attacks

• Integration of open-source software and commercial software.
• Inherent security limitations in various technologies.
• Ignorance of people.
• Activities performed by people.
• International legal environments.

• The integration of open-source software and commercial software sometimes provides security issues.
• Commerial operating system vendors will often include open-source software in their products.
• But vulnerabilities are often found in the open source software that the public becomes aware of and can use to compromise the commercial software.

• Some technologies have inherent security limitations that can inhibit efforts to prevent malicious attacks.
• For example, email cannot always be verified as coming from a specific server because secure certificates are not included in email standards.
• Additionally, it can be challenging for spam software to be completely sure that it has detected that a message is spam and therefore some software must be conservative to prevent deleting legitimate messages.

• Many people are ignorant about basic attack mechanisms and thus attackers are successful in using trivial attack mechanisms.
• This is fundamental to an understanding of why phinshing attacks are so successful.
• People often do not carefuly inspect the sender address of their emails and therefore can be easily lead to believe that emails come from legitimate sources.

• People's activities sometimes increase their chances of becoming attacked.
• For example, some people download materials from questionable sources.
• Spam attacks are encouraged because some people actually purchase the products described in these messages.

• Many countries outside the United States have legal climates that make it difficult to punish those participating in malicious attacks.
• For example, captcha-sweatshops have been erected in some countries that allows attackers to obtain a large number of email addresses from trusted domains such as yahoo.com and gmail.com for the purpose of distributing spam!

With the right amount of computer software, an education about what the problem is, and good computer habits you can minimize the potential threat of a Malicious Attack.
Here’s How:
 Know the attackers strategies. If you understand how an attack could happen you are more likely to see one coming.
 Install software programs such as; firewalls, a spyware scanner, a
Trojan horse program, as well as an antivirus program. (Make sure that you ALWAYS run up-to-date scans otherwise your computer is not actually secure)
 Mind your computer manners! – Now that you have software checking for issues you must follow good habits to keep your computer safe and healthy. To do so you must: keep your hard drive clean, backup the file and make sure that it is safe to run on your computer

We
• We need to be prepared to combat malicious attacks by being able to identify dangerous software and practicing proper safety measures
• We believe we should increase the penalty for hackers and spammers in order to lessen the amount of Malicious attacks

• The U.S. has the largest Malicious Attack problem in the world
• Always remember there are 6 types of attacks:
• Trojan Horses, Worms, Viruses, Hoaxes, Spam, and Phishing.
• Use proper software programs such as firewalls and anti-viruses and good computing habits to keep your computer healthy and happy!