Hacking Incidents to Surge in 2012 - Kaspersky

According to a cyber threat forecast by Kaspersky Labs, companies that have shielded the cloud-based storage last year should remain alert and cross check all the loops for, 2012 seems to bolster in cyber crime.

Experts at Kaspersky are apparently apprehensive about the progress of the spyware that trapped Sony's PlayStation Network for more than a month, and believes that the virus will surpass the gaming companies.

According to the security company, the hacking events of 2011 hold a fair chance of being repeated in 2012. As such, the list of apprehensions is quite big starting with the June 2011 hacking event that took a toll of Citibank's database stealing information from more than 200,000 customers, Stuxnet worm that corrupted the nuclear weapons program in Iran, and even the hacking operations conducted by the hacktivist organization, Anonymous.

According to the author of the forecast, Alexander Gostev, at present, the majority of cyber incidents that affected companies and state organizations during the last year dealt mostly with arms manufacturing, financial operations, or hi-tech and scientific research activities. However, 2012 will make an impact upon the industries in natural resource extraction, energy, transport, food, and pharmaceutical industries, as well as companies into Internet services and information security companies, as published in itnewsafrica on January 9, 2012.

Unfortunately, cyber conflicts in 2012 tend to be around traditional disputes and confrontations as noticed in the case of dispute between Israel and Iran and the similar conflict between Western Europe and China. The essential weapons that are crafted towards destroying data at a said time including kill switches, logic bombs, and many others intends to become more popular as they are much easier to be manufactured as forecasted by the security firm.

Moreover, on zooming upon the high-end techniques created by various IT-security companies, Kaspersky is apprehensive that hackers need to change their technicalities and schemes in their much targeted attacks. Augmented public attention towards the security loops are also likely to fuel the attackers towards searching for new instruments. The much applied mode of exploitation through e-mail attachment seems to become least effective, though browser attack seems to gain popularity at the same time.

However, Kaspersky anticipates increase in mobile threats in 2012 and is apprehensive that mobile malware market will burn with malware. Even attacks that take advantage of the vulnerabilities in Google Android also seems to be much exploited.

Related article: Hacking Attacks Are Increasing to Haunt Banks

» SPAMfighter News - 1/16/2012