Researchers Outline Emerging Threats

Image spam is the latest way for spam writers to dodge defenses.

Online Crime Migrates to Mobile Phones: While current mobile phone service is generally considered safe, McAfee is seeing a rapid growth in mobile attacks with increasingly technical diversification.

This problem is more prevalent in Japan and other countries which have more mature mobile networks that allow users to conduct ecommerce and banking via their handsets, said Marcus. But it is coming here.

Closing the Data Leakage Tap: Data Leakage is an emerging security concern which can bear an enormous impact on the reputation of a business.

“When you just look at all the ways data can leave the network, the USB drive and portable storage is certainly a large aspect of it, but the user being allowed to manipulate the data in different ways is also a significant part of data leakage,” said Marcus.

While drive encryption is the only reasonably mature preventative technology, McAfee expects that basic data leakage prevention and disk encryption will become ubiquitous in regulated enterprises within the next five years.

Managing Risk: Security risk management is an important issue for IT managers and one that is receiving more and more attention these days, said Marcus. Organizations that fail to be proactive in risk management will find that the businesses they are chartered with protecting will sail on without them.

“You’ve got to know what your business does and then you’ve got to know how the real assets are valuable to the core of the business and make your decisions based on the core assets that actually run the business,” said Marcus. “You don’t spend $100K on a $10,000 asset.”

Rounding out Marcus’ “Top 3” is malware being embedded in video and audio streams. As more and more people access IP-based video and audio so too will malware writers exploit that vector of attack.