Microsoft released its sixth Security Intelligence Report on Wednesday, finding that customers are increasingly being plagued by rogue security software and that researchers continue to focus on finding flaws in third-party applications.


According to the report, which covers the second half of 2008, the top threat was a trojan downloader, known as Renos, which acts a delivery mechanism for rogue security software. Also known as "scareware," rogue security software attempts to fool the user into installing and paying for a fake security program by creating a Web page that looks like a warning to the victim that their PC is infected by malicious software. Similar rogue programs placed seventh and eighth on the list of most common malicious programs, Microsoft said in the report.

"As Microsoft and the industry continue to improve the security of our products and people become more concerned about their online safety and privacy, we see cybercriminals increasingly going after vulnerabilities in human nature rather than software," Vincent Gullotto, general manager of Microsoft's Malware Protection Center, said in a statement announcing the release of the report.

The number of unique vulnerability disclosures decreased by 12 percent in 2008 compared to the prior year, according to Microsoft. While the company did not include its figure for the number of vulnerabilities, the National Vulnerability Database counted 5,633 software flaws released in 2008, compared with 6,514 in 2007, a decrease of 13.5 percent.

Microsoft also found that the number of vulnerabilities rated as High severity by the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) fell by 16 percent in 2008, compared to the previous year.

The data collected by Microsoft underscored that the company's efforts in securing its own software have paid off. On the company's older and less-secure operating system, Windows XP, for example, more than 40 percent of attacks focused on exploiting Microsoft's browser. On the company's more secure Windows Vista, however, attackers eschewed Internet Explorer almost 95 percent of the time, in favor of third-party software.

In addition, attacks using vulnerabilities in Adobe's PDF format took off in the second half of 2008, according to Microsoft.

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