Cyber criminal operations that were emerging last year are likely to change significantly in 2013, with the focus shifting to denial of service attacks.
So says Catalin Cosoi, chief security strategist at antivirus systems provider Bitdefender. "Companies in 2013 will deal with severe, multi-vector denial of service attacks, especially against their cloud-based infrastructures," he warns.
Cosoi also believes virtualised environments to become a major focus in 2013. "We expect to see an increase of attacks against the virtualisation platform itself, in an attempt to seize control of the hypervisor and, implicitly, against all services running on the physical server," he explains.
As more companies outsource core storage to the cloud, attackers will attempt to get access to company documents and intellectual property directly from the cloud, he asserts.
"Last, but not least, companies will suffer severely from the lack of policy enforcement in their BYOD [bring your own device] initiatives," predicts Cosoi.
"Loss of employee-owned devices holding mission-critical data will account for a significant percentage of incidents involving data loss in 2013."