Webroot Released List of E-threats for 2010

Webroot, an Internet security company, published its list of security threats for 2010 during the end-week of December 2009.

Gerhard Eschelbeck, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Engineering, Webroot, said that the modern attacks using malicious software were different from those in recent years. According to him, there would be more hybrid malware that combined web-use and e-mail. The attacks would be more sophisticated and complex in 2010, as reported by SCMagazineUK during the 3rd week of December 2009.

Eschelbeck further said that there would be a growth in narrowly-targeted malicious programs that relied on specific data or applications to carry out their destructive activity.

As social-networking websites rise in popularity, they are expected to cause a critical danger. For example, Facebook serves 350 Million members, while 55 Million updates are incorporated daily, and around 3 Billion content pieces distributed every week. Hence, malware purveyors and other Internet predators are likely to spread infection at an unbelievable rate despite merely a tiny proportion of users encountering contact with the software.

Mike Kronenberg, CTO of Webroot, comments that there would be a plenty of unsolicited e-mails. spammers would be targeting social-networking websites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. The reason for the prediction is that despite CAPTCHA guards, hackers would manage to aim at specific groups of people as well as send web-link embedded e-mails to market viruses, launch phishing attacks, or deliver redirects leading to harmful sites, as reported by Webroot during the 3rd week of December 2009.

Since a large number of people visit social-networking websites, these sites particularly Facebook and Twitter are attacked by phishing e-mail scams for gaining access to login information and passwords of site-members. According to the predictions, the growing number of phishing e-mails and phishing sites will have serious results during 2010.

Finally, social-networking websites have to do more to beat increasing number of hackers. For instance, during August 2009, an XSS vulnerability was detected on Twitter that allowed hackers to capture computer users' cookies and thereby their login details. Although Twitter and other leading social networks act promptly to block these assaults, it isn't astonishing to find them as targets of constantly rising exploits.

Related article: Webroot Detects Malware in Presidential Campaign Videos

» SPAMfighter News - 1/16/2010