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Stonesoft’s CISO Forecasts Rise in Malware Assaults Against Twitter, Facebook Etc.

Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Joona Airamo of a Scandinavia based IT Security Company Stonesoft has forecasted that 2011 will witness a rise in malware assaults via Twitter, Facebook and similar social-networking websites, with just one attack that will harm massive numbers of people. Infosecurity.com published this in news on January 5, 2011.

Adding to the above, Mr. Airamo states that hackers will utilize malicious programs, which copy computer operators' e-mail id lists to dispatch harmful messages or files to those listed ids. Moreover, similar to the typical electronic mail based fraudulent campaigns, the harmful messages or files will seem as if they are from a friend (the first victim), hence a trustworthy source.

The information security officer also said that there would be more of assaults of the "information warfare" kind across different countries. Such assaults, according to him, would be more politically inclined despite assaults bearing monetary-related motives to keep on dominating.

What's more, Mr. Airamo observed that there would be an increase in personalized assaults based on social engineering wherein cyber-criminals would thoroughly investigate the targets so they might creep into corporate networks to make considerable financial benefits.

Over and above, the Stonesoft CISO stated that 2011 would have assaults like Stuxnet striking crucial infrastructures like military and government systems. However, such assaults would be scanty since hackers would require having good resources for developing a PC worm of that scale; he added in one other statement that ComputerWeekly.com published on January 4, 2011.

The information security officer, while elaborating his forecast said that there were 4 zero-day security flaws making up Stuxnet that the Conficker virus too abused. He continued that the complexity of abusing those flaws as well as the cost involved in writing the virus together hinted that the related assaults were government-sponsored.

Additionally, computer operators will witness Apple's operating system come under malware attack, he forecasts.

In the end Mr. Airamo suggests that for warding off the aforementioned online attacks, users must raise their awareness of the different kinds of Internet attacks as also the way for lessening them, if contacted with them.

Related article: Stonesoft Detects AET Assaults Working against Port 80 HTTP Protocol

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