The Current Online Threat Landscape

The days of global outbreak of malware are over. Today, malware attacks target users of a specific geographic region, country, or type, and often remain undetected. Often these attacks are blended and occur in a sequence. They use a collection of different malwares each one playing a specific role in the job of payload delivery. The stealthy attacks, which use the Web for downloading their malware onto target systems, transfer the stolen information back to the fraudster whose ultimate aim is to make money.

During the first half of 2007, TrendLabs traced the evolution in the threat landscape where the 'Storm Worm' wreaked havoc in people's lives and then the 'Italian Job' attacked millions of computers in Italy in June this year.

According to Trend Micro, Web threats would continue to grow with little decline in e-mail threats. Web threats that conduct malicious activities through the Internet and of which the computer user is often unwary persistently use automated techniques and take advantage of flaws to cast information and identity theft. They attack specific kind of users and groups while using blended techniques to achieve their purposes.

The first six months of 2007 saw a growing interest in vigilance of operating system vulnerabilities and undiscovered application. This was because of the various projects on Month of Bugs that came up to challenge software makers, Trend Micros said. The result was that malware authors wrote their codes and introduced them on the Net and Web applications suffered the impact of attacks that exploited vulnerabilities in XSRF and XSS.

Another trend relates to the proliferation of toolkits to exploit flaws. These toolkits help to develop code to make the most of known vulnerabilities.

Trend Micro also reported that phishing continued to remain from December 2006 to May 2007. Phishers generally used the same techniques, most notably the explicit show of the phishing Web link. This still successfully entices users into surrendering account information. The number of phishing links that became invalid with subsequent visits indicates how phishers are able to register and withdraw from Web domains.

Related article: THE SPAM MAFIA

» SPAMfighter News - 9/3/2007