Cyber attacks : What's in store for 2010?

The year 2009 was witness to a remarkable rise in the incidence of spam,
phishing, botnet activity, and malware. So what is store for 2010? Is it going
to be a safer 2010? Not indeed. It can go worse if proper measures are not put
in place at least now, security experts caution.

We have all seen that the cyber criminals have only got smarter and smarter
every passing year. The cyber attacks which onces used to be made for
'Reputation' by the underworld are today more concentrated on making fast bucks.
Security companies have been underscoring that the underground economy is
geographically diverse. The secretive economy has also shown the ability to
generate millions of dollars in revenue for cyber criminals.

As per a recent estimate by Symantec the value of total advertising goods on
underground economy servers was over $276 million in 2009. Says Shantanu Ghosh,
VP, India Product Operations, Symantec, “The security threats in 2010 are likely
to be nastier, more targeted and more frequent, with malware and cyber-crime
being almost exclusively driven by organized crime and motivated by money.”

Hackers, after succeeding in duping the unsuspecting user, are investing in
sophisticated and automated ways to run their operations. Experts say it can be
safely predicted that in 2010 the threat environment will witness higher volumes
of web-threats and be even more transient, agile and organized

Applications

The growth of mobile application sites has become one prominent hurdle in the
fight against hacking. Today, iPhone and BlackBerry users have an unprecedented
number of third-party applications available for their enterprise handhelds.
According to a recent study from Jupiter Research Inc., mobile application
downloads are expected to reach 20 billion annually by 2014. Network security
pros will face mounting challenges from a rising tide of mobile apps touching
private networks and information.

As mobile devices and third-party applications proliferate, they pose a
number of security risks for the enterprise, perhaps most notably serving as a
platform for the distribution of malware and unauthorized access to private
information. Since IT shops already report mounting internal pressure to
integrate and support third-party apps, their options for defending against
related threat vectors are constricted.

Cloud Threat: Crime as a service!

Further adoption of cloud, social media and virtualization technologies are
expected to blur the network parameter, while new cyber criminal methods such as
ransomware and crime as a service will lure in unsuspecting users and threaten
the enterprise at large.

Experts strongly suggest that the security postures must move from a
container-centric approach that is tied to a physical locale to a data and
information-centric security design. To do this, organizations — large and small
— should consider a layered, centralized security solution that provides
multiple security touch points within the network, rather than around it, in
order to protect their information from outside in and inside out.

Threats today are quite blended, arriving through many attack vectors and
associated with many working components. This has proven to be a successful
model as cyber criminals look to effectively infiltrate machines and bypass any
security measures that may be in place. Botnets have long used this technique to
obfuscate and pack their malicious binary code to evade detection

Experts with Fortinet predict that 2010 can witness botnets continue to
attempt to evade detection beyond the binary, with a focus on network
communication. The attacks can come in the form of piggybacking on legitimate
protocols, communication encryption, authentication, and obfuscation.

Already we have seen botnets communi­cating through Twitter and Google
groups. Certainly this scope will expand threatening the cyber landscapes.

SHARATH

Source: CIOL