Cisco Forecasts Online Threats for 2010

Cisco, the network security vendor, in its recently released annual report of 2009, anticipates security trends for 2010. As per the report, coming year will face the prevalence of easy to deploy threats and massive banking exploits.

Zeus Trojan, that created havoc this year, is highlighted in the report. This Trojan serves malware to unwary users via drive-by downloads and phishing e-mails. This malware is potential enough to listen to the system's activity, and through this powerful sense, it can procure user names and passwords for e-mail and banking accounts. Not only this, it is designed in such a way that it can even overpower hardware tokens and onetime passwords which are assumed to provide security from such attacks.

Yet another botnet is Clampi, which focus on bank account to steal online account details of the users. In the recent months, both Clampi and Zeus have gained in strength and size, and for sure they will continue to follow this trend throughout 2010. As of October 2009, it is estimated that Zeus has infected 3.6 Million computers; as per the estimates, the latest Clampi Trojan compromised hundreds of thousands of systems.

Researchers at Cisco said that cyber assailants indicate signs of going on with their cyber campaigns to obtain users' financial login details. They also said that these online crooks are becoming more sophisticated and sharper with their plans.

Cisco's threat research manager, Scott Olechowski, said that as a matter of fact, banking trojans give incredible returns to criminals. Consequently, top black-hat engineers are targeting banking Trojans, as per the news published by SCMagazine on December 8, 2009.

The annual report also highlighted the increase in politically-motivated cyber assaults, which is further anticipated to accelerate. To solve this purpose, distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks are likely to become the most apt weapon. Further, the partial blame for these attacks goes to the rising number of botnets, which dominated the cyber security landscape this year.

To fight any increase in the amount of innovations and attacks in 2010, experts said that the security professionals must put their experiences into practice and prepare themselves well.

Related article: Cisco Finds Two Vulnerabilities and Recommends for Patches

» SPAMfighter News - 12/16/2009