In May 2013, Trend Micro and Deakin University conducted a study into the state of web based threats in Australia. They monitored web activity using Trend Micro’s Smart Protection Network (SPN) technology over a 2 week period.
The key findings were:
- One in eight Australian IPs are exposed to web threats every day
- Researchers’ analysed malicious activity from over 200,000,000 web requests per day from Australia, with around 400,000 of these issued to malicious web pages
- One in every 2,500 web hits originating from Australia is malicious in nature, resulting in Australian users being victim to (3%) of the world web threat attacks
- 57% of malicious traffic was triggered by business product users whilst consumer product users accounted for over a third 41%
You can read the full report here – http://www.trendmicro.com.au/cloud-content/au/pdfs/security-intelligence/white-papers/australian_web_threat_landscape_-v7.pdf. The report includes an example analysis of two spam attacks that occured during that period relating to the Boston Marathon Bombings using a Black Hole Exploit Kit (BHEK) landing page, and a Kelios worm.