Cisco Report Highlights Worldwide Cyber Security Menace

Cisco in a recent report has warned that Internet-based attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated and specialized as profit-driven criminals continue to hone their approach to stealing data from businesses, employees and consumers.
In the 2008 edition of the Cisco® Annual Security Report released last December, the company identifies last year’s top security threats and offers recommendations for protecting networks against attacks that are propagating more rapidly, becoming increasingly difficult to detect, and exploiting technological and human vulnerabilities.
“Every year, Cisco sees threats evolve as criminals discover new ways to exploit people, networks and the Internet. This year’s trends underscore how important it is to look at the basic elements of security policies and technologies,” said Bola Adegbonmire, manager, Cisco Advanced Technologies, Nigeria.
“Organizations can mitigate data loss (data loss prevention) and lower their operational risk by deploying solutions that help control access to information resources based on user identity and computer credentials, IP Video surveillance and application controls to limit the enterprise’s exposure to unauthorized access. It is important to evaluate your enterprise posture relative to a pre-defined security policy to help ensure that the confidentiality, integrity and availability of corporate systems are guaranteed and minimize risk,” he advised.
Notable trends in this Annual Cisco Security Report include - the growth of the overall number of disclosed vulnerabilities by 11.5 percent over 2007; the near tripling of vulnerabilities in virtualization technology from 35 to 103 year over year; attacks becoming increasingly blended, cross-vector and targeted; Cisco researchers seeing a 90 percent growth in threats originating from legitimate domains, nearly double what was seen in 2007; and decline in the volume of malware successfully propagated via e-mail attachments. Over the past two years (2007-2008), the number of attachment-based attacks decreased by 50 percent from the previous two years (2005-2006).
A number of specific threats across the web were identified by the report. First of them is Spam which accounts for nearly 200 billion messages each day and approximately 90 percent of worldwide e-mail.
Also identified was Phishing, which is expected to become more prevalent as criminals personalize spam and make messages appear more credible. Botnets, another threat identified by the Cisco report, are capable of infecting legitimate websites with malicious code that redirect visitors to malware-downloading sites.
Another threat is Social engineering. The use of social engineering to entice victims to open a file or click links continues to grow. Cisco expects that this year, social engineering techniques will increase in number, vectors and sophistication.
In addition, Reputation hijacking which refers to online criminals using real e-mail accounts with large, legitimate Web mail providers to send spam was identified. This avenue offers increased deliverability because it makes spam harder to detect and block.
In 2009, researchers from Cisco will watch trends such as insider threats, data loss and mobility (remote working and new tools as risk factors) closely, said Adegbonmire.