The holiday season has passed (Feb 03, 2011)

The holiday season has passed (Feb 03, 2011)

One month after the Christmas and New Year’s Day, does everybody come back to work? Of course, there is no more shopping, surfing online and gossiping. Let’s get the proof.

First, let’s check the most popular regular online applications people are using for the last couple of months. People like surfing everywhere, such as shopping websites, so, the web analytics statistics application are no doubt the most popular ones, for example, Google Analytics; people like Social Networking, such as Facebook; network Security is an issue, so, people are downloading more software security updates, such as Microsoft Windows Updates. Let’s see how people were using them during the holidays compared to before and after. The spike for the applications started at Nov 15th 2010 and grew gradually, and topped at Dec 14th 2010, and dropped sharply at Dec 17th 2010. The hits amount is almost 14 times of a regular work day.

Second, let’s see the IM, P2P and Multimedia software people like. People still like eMule, BitTorrent to download software/movies; people like Multi-media stream like Shockwave Flash (SWF), PPStream, YouTube; People like Skype, Windows Live Messenger to chat online. The following is the graph for IM, P2P and multi-media online software during the last few months. For the spike of the IM, P2P and Multimedia, it started at Nov 16th 2010 and grew gradually, and topped at Dec 13th 2010, and dropped sharply at Dec 16th 2010. The hits amount is almost 8 times of a regular work day.

Third, hackers are happy as they have time to have fun, post more malicious web pages and got more targets, or make some money… OK, let’s take a look. The spike started at Nov 11th 2010 and grew gradually, and topped at Dec 13th 2010, and dropped sharply at Dec 16th 2010. The hits amount is almost 80 times of a regular work day.

Forth, Trojans/Viruses were not spread so widely during the holiday season. Let’s take a look. The spike started at Nov 18th 2010 and grew slowly, and topped at Dec 15th 2010, and dropped sharply at Dec 16th 2010. The hits amount is almost 6 times of a regular work day.

Guys, back to work. Don’t you see the traffic is back to normal?

Security News

The SonicWall Capture Labs Threat Research Team gathers, analyzes and vets cross-vector threat information from the SonicWall Capture Threat network, consisting of global devices and resources, including more than 1 million security sensors in nearly 200 countries and territories. The research team identifies, analyzes, and mitigates critical vulnerabilities and malware daily through in-depth research, which drives protection for all SonicWall customers. In addition to safeguarding networks globally, the research team supports the larger threat intelligence community by releasing weekly deep technical analyses of the most critical threats to small businesses, providing critical knowledge that defenders need to protect their networks.