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Loading ...Cyber crooks getting cleverer
By Joaquim P. Menezes -
Several years ago, John Roese – when he was chief technology officer of Enterasys Networks (he’s now CTO of Nortel) commented on how the IQ level of some cyber crooks was in inverse proportion to the havoc they’re able to cause.
Many really crippling attacks, he suggested, had more to do with the sophistication of hacking tools out there than the smarts or expertise of the hacker.
The unfortunate thing is while hacking technologies are getting more effective, the criminals who are using them are also getting much smarter.
The breed of really savvy hackers (call them evil geniuses, if you will) is growing – no doubt about it.
This fact is confirmed by the latest Symantec Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), which notes that cybercriminals are becoming “more professional in the development, distribution and use of malicious code and services.”
The report says cyber crooks – among other things – are:
Exploiting Trusted Environments to Target Victims – Symantec detected attackers indirectly targeting victims by exploiting vulnerabilities in trusted environments, such as popular financial, social networking and career recruitment Web sites. Once compromised, these sites are used as a source for distribution of malicious programs.
Launching Multi-Staged Attacks – During the first six months of 2007 there was an increase in the number of multi-staged attacks – which consist of an initial attack not intended to perform malicious activities immediately, but that is used to deploy subsequent attacks.
Symantec documented 237 vulnerabilities in Web browser plug-ins – an alarming increase, when you consider the number of such vulnerabilities were just over the 74 in the second half of 2006, and 34 in the first half of 2006.
