Excerpts from Microsoft Security Intelligence Report 2013

Microsoft has recently published it Microsoft Security Intelligence Report 2013 that analyzes the threat landscape of exploits, vulnerabilities, and malware using data from Internet services and over 600 million computers worldwide. Here are some of the excerpts from the report:

• Malware encounters are much more common than malware infections
• Web-based (HTML/JavaScript) threats continued to be the most commonly encountered type of exploit encountered in 2Q13, followed by Java exploits and operating system exploits.
• The infection Rate is highest in Windows XP SP3 amongst supported Windows client operating systems, 2Q13
• Encouter rate is highest in Windows 7 SP1 followed by Win Vista SP2
• Autorun, the most commonly encountered threat worldwide

• The encounter rate for consumer consumers was 1.5 times as high as that of enterprise computers in 1Q13, with the relative difference increasing to

  1.8 in 2Q13.

• Blocked mail volumes in 1H13 were up slightly from 2H12, but remain well
  below levels seen prior to the end of 2010
• SmartScreen Filter detected 4.2 phishing sites per 1,000 Internet hosts
  worldwide in 2Q13.
• Countries such as Indonesia, Ukraine and Russia have highest concentration of Phishing sites.