2008 to Become the Year of Cyber Crimes

One of the leading security vendors, MessageLabs, reported that 2008 will witness a huge increase in the Internet economy, which will further help in boosting cyber crime with enhanced and easy availability of "e-crime tools". It has been predicted that the cyber crime market that is worth $105 Billion is all set to grow due to increased attacks by spammers this year.

It is also predicted that 2008 will witness the expansion of the scam and spam tools as people are adopting file attachments and approaches. The end of 2007 initiated the use of MP3 files for stocking spam. The prediction by MessageLabs further reveals that 'cyber-criminals' will get their hands onto video file formats for scamming while spammers will get their hands onto PPt attachments, just like malware writers.

A security expert and the President of Asian School Laws, Rohas Nagpal, said, as reported by Business Standard on January 2, 2008, that the rise in cyber attackers in Russia and China has led to the excessive growth in the cyber crimes. He further said that the cyber attackers are earning millions by performing cyber crimes and selling cyber crime tools.

Any user possessing the updated version of security software on his computer is also prone to cyber attacking threats, as cyber attackers are using zero-day exploits. The vulnerability of security software indicates that cyber attackers have been able to exploit the flaws that have not been detected by the software manufacturers.

As there has been a tremendous rise in the number of users protecting their computers with anti-virus software, security software and firewalls, the spammers and cyber attackers are inventing new ways to attack computers and send spam through backdoors.

The backdoor entry can be carried out through various ways, like convincing users to access malicious audio and video content through a website. These website are created to exploit the flaws and errors in web browser or media player. The flaw detected in the web browser or media player support the cyber attackers to install software in order to access a person's computer remotely.

The virus writers are further expected to decipher new ways to send malicious images and video clips into most popular and heavy traffic oriented social networking sites like Facebook MySpace, and YouTube.

Related article: “Loopholes did not cause online banking thefts”: ICBC

» SPAMfighter News - 1/19/2008