Java attacks have jumped by more than 1,200% in only a few months, according to Microsoft.
The number of attacks jumped from fewer than half a million in Q2 this year to well over six million in Q3, according to data from Microsoft.
Holly Stewart, a researcher at the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, revealed that attacks on vulnerable Java code - not those using JavaScript - had topped the total number of attacks using Adobe exploits.
"What I discovered was that some of our exploit 'malware' families were telling a scary story - an unprecedented wave of Java exploitation," Stewart said in a Microsoft blog post, with data showing 6,412,482 attacks against Java hitting 2,488,794 computers in the quarter.
She blamed the Java spike on three vulnerabilities, all of which have been patched for a while. "Java is ubiquitous, and, as was once true with browsers and document readers like Adobe Acrobat, people don't think to update it," she noted. "On top of that, Java is a technology that runs in the background to make more visible components work. How do you know if you have Java installed or if it's running?"
She advised users to install patches and deploy real-time security protection.
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