We have just released the 10th edition of the Symantec Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR). For the past five years, Symantec has been tracking the various trends in Internet security—involving malicious code, vulnerabilities, and Internet attacks—and compiling them twice a year into the ISTR. In my experience working as a vulnerability analyst, moderating Bugtraq, and contributing to the ISTR, there is one thing that is certain: vulnerabilities are on the rise. For the period affecting the current ISTR X release, we logged 2,249 new vulnerability records into our database, which is also a new high for the most new vulnerabilities in any given six-month period. The previous high was 1,912 new vulnerability records, which was reported in the second half of 2005. As usual, the majority of these vulnerabilities affect Web-based applications (68%-69%).
Not only are there more vulnerabilities, there are more affected vendors than ever before. In light of the...
