A study done by NTT Group reveals that exploit kit writers are more interested in vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash rather than the Java vulnerabilities.
In 2015, the top 10 vulnerabilities targeted by exploit kits belonged to Adobe Flash. However in 2013, the scenario was different, the top 10 vulnerabilities targeted by exploit kits included one Flash and eight Java vulnerabilities.
The reason behind this shift is that the vulnerabilities in Java have dropped drastically, while vulnerabilities in Flash has jumped by almost 312 per cent (four-fold) over 2014 levels, NTT reports.
In their latest global threat intelligence report that was published on Tuesday, states that spear phishing attacks accounted for approximately 17 per cent of incident response activities, and an 18 per cent rise in malware detected for every industry other than education.
The report consists of analysis of threats and trends from the 1999, information from 24 security operations centers, seven R&D centers, 3.5 trillion logs, 6.2 billion attacks and nearly 8,000 security clients across six continents.
"NTT clients from the education sector tended to focus less on the more volatile student and guest networks, but malware for almost every other sector increased," a spokesman from NTT Group's Solutionary managed security service business commented.