Ready or not, the year 2010 is already around the bend and it is coming with some doomsday predictions including heightened criminal activities to steal money, identities and computer resources using more and more sophisticated techniques, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek can now reveal.
Regrettably, the security threats next year are likely to be nastier than ever, more targeted and more frequent. With malware and cybercrime now being almost exclusively driven by organised crime running on a business model, changes are largely driven by criminal cost/benefit analysis of opportunities and risks.
Every year, most of the security vendors' forecasts predict dramatic spikes in volumes of spam, phishing, botnet activity, and malware.
And unfortunately, every year these predictions come true.
For many years now most malicious code and web sites have been directly or indirectly about stealing money, identity, computer resources, or some combination of these. In simple terms the cyber criminals:
A report by Lloyd Borrett from AVG available to Nigeria CommunicationsWeek said that “today malicious code is written with more variants”
“While we’d prefer not to be sowing seeds of fear, uncertainty and doubt, the cyber criminals are succeeding on such a scale and making so much money, that each year they are able to invest in better and more automated ways to run their rapidly expanding and increasingly sophisticated operations. So once again we can safely predict that in 2010 the threat environment will look pretty much like this year — except that it will have more of everything and be even more transient, agile and organized” Borret added
According to the report, the bad guys can now automatically create hundreds of thousands of unique pieces of malware a day, much of which has no unique signature and can bypass old-fashioned signature-based virus detection software. This makes it increasingly important for people to have more than just anti-virus protection on their computer.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that the good news is that reputable security vendors now provide full Internet security suites with multiple layers of protection.
“The majority of people that pay for security software now buy the full suite, complete protection solution instead of entry-level solutions. This trend continued through 2009, in spite of tougher economic times, and we expect it to be maintained in 2010” the report said
Some of the trend in 2010 will include the use by criminals of “in the cloud” technologies in far more sophisticated and effective ways than most legitimate businesses.
For instance, it was recently discovered that Google's AppEngine had been tapped to act as the master control channel to feed commands to large networks of infected computers in a botnet. (Google shut down the rogue app shortly after being notified of it.)
Again, the number of computers and number of people connected to the Internet is still growing fast. More and more people in Nigeria are going online with improved connection speeds.
Unfortunately many of them are using pirated software that can’t be kept up to date with security patches. This makes it easy for the bad guys to target those computers, get control of them and start using them as resources to power their criminal activities.
Borret expect to see a big increase in threats being delivered via emerging countries in 2010 just as the global economic crisis will continue to impact security
The criminal gangs will also have a field day because many businesses have poor update policies, which leave their networks well out of date on OS and application patches. These weaknesses are the stock-in-trade of the drive-by download exploits commonly used by the cyber criminals.
It also means business is ignoring the fact that the cyber criminals buy professional advertising served by legitimate ad-serving networks, and yes, even the biggest ad networks.
