Cyber criminals will target Facebook, Twitter: McAfee Labs

Unveiling its McAfee Labs stated that Facebook and Twitter will be platforms of choice for emerging threats. McAfee also foresees that HTML 5 will attract attackers, there will be increased Trojan sophistication and that 2010 will be a good year for law enforcement’s fight against cyber crime.

“Over the past decade, we’ve seen a tremendous improvement in the ability to successfully monitor, uncover, and stop cyber crime,” said Jeff Green, Senior Vice President of McAfee Labs. “We’re now facing emerging threats from the explosive growth of social networking sites, the exploitation of popular applications and more advanced techniques used by cyber criminals, but we’re confident that 2010 will be a successful year for the cyber security community.”

McAfee Labs threat predictions for 2010:

• Social networks will be platform of choice for emerging threats
• Facebook, Twitter, and third-party applications on these sites are rapidly changing the criminal toolkit, giving cyber criminals new technologies to work with and hot spots of activity that can be exploited. Users will become more vulnerable to attacks that blindly distribute rogue applications across their networks, and cyber criminals will take advantage of friends trusting friends to get users to click on links they might otherwise treat cautiously. The use of abbreviated URLs on sites like Twitter make it even easier for cyber criminals to mask and direct users to malicious Web sites. McAfee Labs predicts that cyber criminals will increasingly use these tactics across the most popular social networking sites in 2010.
• Web evolution will give new opportunities to write malware
  The release of Google Chrome OS and the technological advancements of HTML 5 will continue to shift user activity from desktop to online applications, creating yet another opportunity for malware writers to prey on users. HTML 5’s anticipated cross-platform support also provides an additional motivation for attackers, enabling them to reach users of many mainstream browsers.
• Banking Trojans, email attachments delivering malware will rise in volume, sophistication
  McAfee Labs warns that banking Trojans, having demonstrated new tactics in 2009, will become even more sophisticated in 2010 and easily get around current protections used by banks. New techniques include a Trojan’s ability to silently interrupt a legitimate transaction to make an unauthorized withdrawal and simultaneously check the user’s transaction limits to stay below them and avoid alerting the bank. Email attachments, a longstanding delivery method for malware, will continue to rise in volume and increasingly target corporations, journalists, and individual users.
• Cyber criminals will continue to target Adobe Reader, Flash
  In 2009, McAfee Labs saw an increase in attacks targeting client software. Due to the growing popularity of Adobe applications, McAfee Labs expects that cyber criminals will continue to target Adobe products, primarily Acrobat Reader and Flash, two of the most widely deployed applications in the world. McAfee Labs expects Adobe product exploitation will likely surpass that of Microsoft Office applications in 2010.
• Botnet infrastructure shifts from centralized model to peer-to-peer control
  Botnets, the versatile infrastructure that launches nearly every type of cyber attack from spamming to identity theft, will continue to use a seemingly infinite supply of stolen computing power and bandwidth around the globe. Following a number of successful botnet takedowns, including the McColo ISP, botnet controllers must adjust to the increasing pressure cyber security professionals are placing on them. In 2010, McAfee Labs expects to see a significant adoption of peer-to-peer control, a distributed and resilient botnet infrastructure, rather than the centralized hosting model that we see today. For cyber criminals, the benefits will finally outweigh the costs of the peer-to-peer model, due to the security community’s increasingly aggressive attempts to shut down and deny access to botnets.
• Cyber crime: A good year for law enforcement
  Next year marks a decade in the fight that international law enforcement agencies have undertaken against cyber crime. McAfee Labs has seen significant progress in the universal effort to identify, track, and combat cyber crime by governments worldwide. McAfee believes that in 2010 we’ll see many more successes in the pursuit of cyber criminals.