CYBERSPACE – According to security software vendor Symantec’s latest Internet Security Threat Report, internet-based attacks are growing in both number and sophistication as criminals shift their focus from exploits designed to destroy data to attacks geared towards stealing data.According to Symantec’s survey, which covers a six-month period from July 1st to December 31st of last year, 80-percent of all web-based threats are now designed to steal consumers’ personal information, the intellectual property of corporations, or to control an end user’s computer.

The survey also found that large-scale attacks, like the much publicized “Red Alert” and “Blaster” threats, are on the decline, with hackers now showing a preference for softer targets like individual desktop machines and vulnerable home networks. Such attacks are generally designed to be clandestine – rather than disable a user’s machine, the exploit is designed to compromise the box and steal the data, ideally without the end-user ever being aware of the attack.

More and more attacks are browser-based these days, Symantec’s survey found, which stands to reason, as consumers are increasingly shopping online for downloadable products like music and software.

“Many attackers switched to Web browsers as a primary download channel,” Vincent Weafer, senior director of Symantec’s security response team said in an interview with CNNMoney.com. “Almost 70-percent of weaknesses are related to Web technologies. You really have to be careful as to what programs you are downloading.”

According to the survey, email-based “phishing” threats, attempts to steal financial and other personal data from end users, accounted for one out of every 119 e-mail messages delivered over the second half of 2005, an increase from the first six months of 2005, wherein the rate was one phishing expedition per 125 messages. The survey found that the overall amount of spam was down in the second half of 2006, however.

While most attacks are generated domestically – 31-percent of all attacks originate within the U.S. according to Symantec – the number of threats coming out of China showed a sharp increase in the latest report. According to the report, there was an increase of 153-percent in attacks coming out of China in the second half of 2005, and that the number computers that had been incorporated into and/or infected by “bot” networks increased 37-percent over the same period of time.