Damballa Says, 2008 will be year of Targeted Attacks and BotnetThe report findings of Damballa, an anti-botnet technology and research firm, says that several bot herders are recruiting their "zombie" participants or imposing targeted attacks by making malware hidden in original folders that comes in everyday formats like Adobe Acrobat Reader or Microsoft Office. In order to prove its report findings, Damballa carried out some tests in which they installed almost 14 new conventional document attacks to the VirusTotal site, which permits researchers to test latest exploits against famous, off-the-shell security and anti-virus products. Further, out of the 32 tools that were tested, just 19% could rightly find the targeted attacks fixed in the standard file types. Senior Researcher of Damballa, Paul Royal, informs that Botnets are aimed at specific targets unlike Storm which is focused at every node. Paul also said that operators of botnet want their bots to be more accurate and consistent, so they focus more on corporate systems, as reported by darkREADING on June 2, 2008. Another most important finding of the report is targeted attacks. The reports also points out that the use of social engineering techniques to wage attacks have developed, as reported by Business Wire on June 2, 2008. Interestingly, these attacks don't use luring subject lines instead they use subjects that are of prime importance to companies' users such as monetary topics like notification from IRS notification, political topics based on present events like 2008 Olympics games in China, Tibet issue, human rights and private topics viz. scholarship offers and speaker invitations. Security experts suggested that companies should enhance their knowledge on dangers of targeted attacks. IDS, Firewall, antivirus usually fails to find these kinds of attacks, as reported by Business Wire on June 2, 2008. No doubt that bots will be playing a significant role in cyber security. Paul said that this year (2008) is going to be a year of targeted attacks. He also explained that targeted attacks are capable evade conventional enterprise security body and encourage harmful activities like data exfiltration. Related article: Damballa Unveils Top Ten Botnets of the US » SPAMfighter News - 09-06-2008
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