Recently, I noticed a remarkable decrease in remote file inclusion attacks against my web servers. Usually, I easily detected 100+ attacks per day using a simple regular expression match. These days, I see maybe a dozen (and they are usually only 2-3 distinct "attacks" meaning different exploits or different attackers.

The number of vulnerabilities exploited also decreased a lot, with many of the older vulnerabilities being no longer probed. 

Have all vulnerable systems been exploited or cleaned up? These attacks where never very effective, and a lot of exploits used would not have been successful even against vulnerable systems. In addition, the attacks where usually launched blindly without recognizance, leading to a lot of hits to non existent pages.

For the few attacks still out there, the pattern doesn't have changed much. I checked out a couple of the payloads and they are either simple indicators or PHP IRC bots.

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Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D.
SANS Technology Institute
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