Cyber-security Issues for 2008 Listed by SANS

Twelve security experts from the SANS Institute teamed up to predict the most dangerous attacks for 2008 that would lead to a substantial damage.

The US educational body lists ten most ferocious threats by cyber attackers. The revelation has been reached to by analyzing the patterns of the emerging attacks. The attack which tops the chart is the attacks attempted on the web browsers, especially Quick Time and the plug-in components like Flash. The next on SANS' list is the increasingly effective botnets that are coordinated groups of compromised computers.

The third attack in the list of the SANS report is cyberespionage. The next in the list is threats to mobile phones, followed by the insider attacks. Advanced identity theft from persistent bots is on the sixth position. The other attacks that are mentioned in the SANS report are the attacks by the malicious spyware that is consistently on a rise along with the exploitation of web application security.

The ninth attack that has been listed in the SANS report are the event based attacks that are rising considerably, and the tenth position is occupied by the rising risk of the malware effecting supply chain of consumer device.

Vice President of consulting services at NGS Software based in UK, Timothy Mullen, said that IT chiefs are required to set up cyber defenses up to the core, and should limit users to access information by educating them. The news report was published by ComputerWeekly on January 14, 2008.

The Research Director at Sans Institute, Alan Paller, commented in his statement, as reported by ComputerWeekly on January 14, 2008 that cyber attackers target famous and trusted websites, which visitors consider effectively safe. In the process, visitors are infected with viruses, keyloggers, malicious programs and trojans using components of browsers like Flash and QuickTime. The attacks caused by these components are seldom patched mechanically.

Former White House Security Adviser and survey contributor, Howard Schmidt, stated that the security experts have detected malware in digital devices also, including disc drives, global positioning systems, USB data sticks, and digital photo frames, as reported by ComputerWeekly on January 14, 2008.

Related article: Cyber Child abuser Sentenced To Imprisonment

» SPAMfighter News - 1/28/2008