Sophisticated Malware Assaults To Grow During 2011

Rodney Joffe, Senior Technologist and Senior Vice-President at Neustar a security company, lately, while discussing the future scenario of e-threats expected to hit enterprises during 2011 stated that it was necessary for organizations to prepare themselves against Internet attacks, particularly advanced assaults against systems that were controlled with computers. Tmcnet.com published this on December 17, 2010.

Joffe cited the recent Stuxnet a sophisticated worm that according to him was a stealthy program being used in targeted assaults in the present era. These assaults were chanced to get more-and-more popular among online crooks during 2011 for attacking financial systems, he cautioned.

He then explained that attacks on financial systems were drawing a lot of attention within the underground economy; however, they wouldn't be only on banking systems, rather they'd be on numerous PC-related systems like the lift and heating machines within offices. Computerweekly.com reported this during the 2nd week of December 2010.

Joffe stated that big-sized industrial companies usually knew about the above kind of cyber-attacks, while small-and-medium sized businesses like manufacturers of lifts, air-conditioners and aircrafts were unaware of Stuxnet's consequences.

Alongside this malware's danger, Joffe pointed out one more possible malware, which will cause increasing anxiety for businesses during 2011. That'd be the current destructive DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) assaults like the ones which hit organizations associated with the WikiLeaks disclosures. DDoS assaults involving "social hactivism," which were significantly successful surrounding WikiLeaks, would be new threats during 2011.

Joffe added that this problem could be corrected if IT managers embraced a technique that would detect whilst their traffic got routed via unauthorized 3rd-party infrastructure. Nevertheless, the risk was in network engineers rerouting such traffic and presently there wasn't any method for stopping it, he alerted.

In his opinion, a commercial way out off the problem was possible, no less than two years ahead. Hence, it was necessary that IT managers supervised their traffic that flowed from places other than their organizations' PC networks, while remained ready for disconnecting systems from the Internet incase route hijacking was identified, to save login credentials and e-mails from getting exposed, despite the process being disruptive and expensive.

Related article: Substantial Growth in Organized Cybercrime in 2008

» SPAMfighter News - 12/31/2010