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We have OWASP to tell us about common security vulnerabilities in webapps and such, but what are the most common infection vectors for personal computers?

A few example vectors:

  • Social engineering (trojans)
  • Browser exploits
  • Document / application exploits (e.g. PDF, Office, etc)
  • Remote code execution in OS services

I'm particularly interested in any academic papers, preferably relatively new (last 3-4 years), and any decent statistical analyses of attacks and infections.

If there's anything out there on the geographic distribution of these types of attacks, I'd be interested in that too.

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Also USB memory and mobile storage. This is new (as last 5 years) common infection vector. Every second USB drive I got and scan it have some viruses in the root folder. – Andrew Smith Jul 31 '12 at 22:28
I have written my bachelor thesis on this topic. But I have no idea if it is useful for you. It is in german. – vlad Apr 29 at 10:46
@vlad Thanks for the offer, but sadly mein Deutsch ist sehr schlecht! – Polynomial Apr 29 at 10:52

1 Answer

up vote 3 down vote accepted

The Verizon Data Breaches report is useful here ( http://www.verizonbusiness.com/resources/reports/rp_data-breach-investigations-report-2012_en_xg.pdf)

I can't view it right now but I seem to recall that the top routes in were social engineering, flash, document macros and pdf functionality.

Very few these days are in the OS.

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