Cyber-Attacks Growing with Casual User Behavior and Targeted Malware Campaigns

Cisco in its new Annual Security report states that end-users' careless attitude together with malware attacks on specific targets are posing risk of security breaches to many industry segments with the greatest danger being for chemical-and-pharmaceutical sector.

End-users who remain chief targets likely even unwittingly assist cyber-assaults. The threat intelligence investigation team of Cisco reveals that all through 2014, attackers turned their attention away from operating systems (OSs) and servers since greater number of users accessed hijacked websites for downloading content thus resulting in Silverlight attacks to rise 280% while malvertising exploits and spam increased 250%.

In targeted attacks on end-users, the medium for disseminating undesirable applications or malware are browser add-ons, a strategy proving effective as numerous end-users essentially trust add-ons alternatively just regard them harmless.

There's greater sophistication observed among adversaries within their style of executing assaults as well as in eluding identification, the report states.

The attackers alter the tools and techniques employed in just no time, getting clean of tracks on a network prior to getting them to halt else swiftly select another mode for gaining admission.

According to Principal Engineer Jason Brvenik with Security Business Team of Cisco, attackers have gotten increasingly efficient in exploiting security gaps. Channelweb.co.uk published this, January 20, 2015.

Brvenik adds his organization noticed 56% of the entire OpenSSL editions continuing to be susceptible to Heartbleed while prominent assaults just utilize 1% of extremely important security flaws at any point-of-time.

John Stewart CSO at Cisco says that deploying security patches is a really difficult task within a complicated Information Technology arrangement since then the IT system requires being made non-operational. Csoonline.com published this, January 20, 2015.

Moreover, the necessary patches mayn't yet be obtainable alternatively no patch has any longer been applied to the software.

Stewart states that he's aware of companies which continue to use Windows NT without patching.

Conversely, if a company has complicated environment alongside numerous suppliers, patching maybe greater in number than what it can cope with.

Cisco for its research interviewed security executives from 1,700 businesses within United Kingdom and 8 more nations among which Germany, USA, China and India are included.

» SPAMfighter News - 1/29/2015