Microsoft releases security report

Microsoft released their fairly comprehensive Security Intelligence Report today. Among the interesting badware-related findings:

• Rogue security products, such as XP Antivirus 2008 and its many similarly-named variants, have increased significantly in recent months
• Attackers are increasingly focusing on exploiting applications (e.g., MS Office, Adobe Reader, etc.) in addition to or instead of the OS and browser
• The types of badware targeted at particular populations vary significantly by country. For example, password stealers for game and other account information are much more prevalent in China and Brazil, while other types of Trojans are more prevalent in the U.S.
• Malware hosting is most concentrated in China, Russia, the Balkan nations, the U.S., and Spain. This is a bit different than our findings, which makes sense, as Microsoft is looking more at where the actual executables are hosted, while Google (which supplies us with data) looks at where the drive-by exploits are found.
• Microsoft detects one drive-by download in every 1,500 web pages indexed.

Far more information can be found in the report, which can be downloaded here.