The first quarter of the year saw many popular software packages, like Reader/Acrobat, Flash and Java all dealing with multiple zero-day exploits. These exploits became widely available in underground circles long before the vendors could make patches available.

One incident of this in a quarter is significant, but having multiple ones affecting different applications is much more unusual. Without doing any thing wrong on the users part, it put users at an increased risk of infection.

One of the most destructive exploits, aside from the familiar Blackhole exploit kit and whitehole and cool, was a large-scale attack that took many South Korean computers offline by deleting their Master Boot Record. It is still unclear as to the identity of those responsible for the attacks.