The continuous attacks in which criminals design malicious Flash video clips, and embed them in legitimate Web pages and on PDFs, clearly illustrates Adobe has become the favourite target for cyber criminals.
So said Roel Schouwenberg, senior anti-virus researcher for Kaspersky Lab, Americas, during the Kaspersky Lab Virus Analyst Summit, in Cyprus, last week. “For the last 18 months, Adobe has been the biggest vector for attacks – 47.5% of exploits were Adobe in the first quarter of 2010.”
To put this in perspective, he said less than 15% of attacks were Microsoft-based.
There are several reasons for this, he noted. “Microsoft has implemented some big improvements; for example, XP Service Pack 2 introduced data execution prevention, which eradicates the exploitation of a certain class of vulnerabilities. It also introduced firewalls and automatic updates.”
Vista also had some improvements; for one, introducing ASLR, which puts core components of Windows in different locations, making it less vulnerable to exploitation. “A while back there was a new zero-day exploit practically every other week, but once Microsoft started investing money into trustworthy computing initiatives, the picture changed.”
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