Holidays = Malicious Code

Since I started monitoring malicious code, there has been one very obvious trend. 

After a long holiday break, such as Christmas, Easter or any other holiday, lasting more than a few days, the malware coders are having a global release party of new malicious code for sure.

On the defending side, the system/network administrators and developers might be in for a cold shower while turning back to work, after enjoying some very well earned days of with family and friends. Just to see their web and operating system logs covered in brute force login attempts, traversal web dances, code execution attempts, cookie fungus, DoS coughs etc. The list is of this kind of activities can be made long, but it does of course not necessarily mean a compromised system, but enough to give one a headache. The worst scenario is if you as and admin realize that new exploit has been released in the wild, while you were eating turkey and laying exhausted on the couch watching all those "saved for later" DVD's. 

Somehow I wish it was legal to spawn attacks back every-time a bad packet reached my ethernet layer. To bad, most of the attacks are from already compromised boxes or thru wide opened proxies.