IS4560 Hacker tools, techniques and incident handeling
Unit 1 Homework 1

Attacks are defined as any malicious activity carried out over a network that has been detected by an intrusion detection system, intrusion prevention system, or firewall. Based on the geographical map the whitepaper lays out for us, the United States receives chart topping threats in malicious code, phishing hosts, bots, and attack origin.
Web based threats are increasing by the day with the endless amount of client-side vulnerabilities, attackers can focus on websites to mount additional, client side attacks. The most common web based attack in 2009 was related to malicious PDF activity, which actually accounted for almost 50% of web-based attacks. The year before that number was only at 11%. This attack got so popular because exchanging PDF files was a common day to day activity. So it wasn’t rare when you saw one in your inbox and didn’t think twice before opening it. 34% of all web based attacks happen in the United States, China is second with 7%. Some of those extremely high U.S. numbers are actually on the decline from the previous year’s report. Most of the decrease is because of increases in other countries and the Federal Trade Commission shut down a ISP that was known to distribute malicious code, among other content. One of the botnets linked to the ISP was Pandex (aka Cutwall). This botnet was responsible for as much as 35% of spam observed globally. The most difficult part of web based attacks is actually preventing them in the first place. Both businesses and citizens are prone to these attacks because most of the time they don’t even know it is happening until it is far too late, or sometimes referred to as a drive-by-download. Another threat that is a high security risk is identity theft, and 65% of Americans polled said they were very worried about it