AppRiver’s Report Predicts Increase in Cloud and Zero-Day Attacks

Security company AppRiver published its 'Threat and Spamscape Forecast for 2010' in the second week of January 2010. The report throws light on the major projections for 2010.

The report claims that the personal information is considered very profitable in the underground economy, and similar to 2009, it will continue to be a much sought-after target for cyber crooks in 2010. This year (2010) will witness more customized malware made for specific purposes like acquiring credit card purchase transactions and details of cardholders.

Online gaming will be yet another favorite target for the hackers. The objective is to hack accounts and pilfer in-game funds. Further, as several games have started to integrate social networking websites like Facebook to share in-game attainments and others, AppRiver researchers suspected that they may likely see private data information breach vulnerabilities between platforms.

AppRiver professes that there will be increasing number of cloud-based computing assaults in 2010. Referring to the thriving and beneficial instance of Amazon's EC2, the security vendor claims that malware creators have started hosting harmful code on important cloud-based servers. AppRiver further suspects that such kinds of attacks may hit Google Wave in 2010.

As per AppRiver, there will be much more number of complex phishing assaults in 2010, with Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) decision to start permitting domain names to be registered in non-Roman characters like Japanese, Cyrillic and Chinese.

Further, zero-day malware assaults will keep on rising in 2010 as malware creators become highly destructive. Response time by security researchers and security firms will prove vital.

Security experts also informed that Web users will witness more data breaches in the current year (2010) as majority of data infringes in 2009 were accidental. Through cybercrime and hacking, instances of data infringement by former employees are likely to increase further.

With this predication for 2010, Senior Security Analyst for AppRiver, Fred Touchette, opined that attacks will continue augmenting in 2010, reported Help Net Security in the second week of January 2010.

Finally, it is noted that some other security firms, like Kaspersky, Symantec and Trend Micro, have already released their security projections for 2010.

Related article: AppRiver Reports Security Trends for November 2008

» SPAMfighter News - 1/25/2010