Executive Foreword
Welcome to Volume 14 of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report. Over the past six and a half years we’ve published literally thousands of pages of threat intelligence in this report. Categories of focus continue to include trends and insights on security vulnerabilities, exploit activity, malware and potentially unwanted software, spam, phishing, malicious websites, and security trends from 105+ locations around the world.
Volume 14 contains the latest intelligence with analysis completed, focused on the second half of 2012 and inclusive of trend data going back a year or more. To summarize across the findings of hundreds of pages of new data: industry-wide vulnerability disclosures are down, exploit activity has increased in many parts of the world, several locations with historically high malware infection rates saw improvements but the worldwide malware infection rate increased slightly, Windows 8 has the lowest malware infection rate of any Windows-based operating system observed to date, Trojans continue to top the list of malware threats, spam volumes went up slightly, and phishing levels remained consistent.