Security threats are starting to merge

Blended threats are on the rise

The purveryors of malware are becoming increasingly well-organised and financed, according to vendor Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report.

In the past e-criminals made money from selling code, estiablishing botnets, or spamming, but gangs are now performing all three functions themselves to provide more co-ordianated attacks.

'We are starting to see blended threats much more,' said Ollie Whitehouse, researcher at Symantec. 'This is a stark contrast to how things were working a year ago. There is more financial backing to these criminals now: the organized crime aspect has definitely increased.'

Whitehouse says Symantec is spotting phishing and Trojan emails specifically designed to channel information back to specific web servers - a sign that threats are being co-ordinated.

Symantec recorded an average of 5,213 denial of service (DoS) attacks per day, down from 6,110 in the first half of the year. The US was the target of most DoS attacks, accounting for 52 per cent of the global total.

The UK was the  country targeted most frequently with DoS attacks within Europe, the Middle East and Africa, accounting for 49 per cent of DoS attacks in the region, up from 44 per cent in the first half of the year.

On an international scale China was home to 26 per cent of the world’s bot-infected computers, more than any other country. Beijing was the city with the most bot-infected computers in the world, accounting for just over five per cent of the worldwide total.

London had the third-highest proportion of bots of any city in the world at three per cent.

Symantec expects to see more threats begin to appear on Windows Vista, with a focus on vulnerabilities, malicious code and attacks against the Teredo platform. Symantec also expects that attackers will focus on third-party applications that run on Vista.