Web and Windows Vista threats set to grow in 2008

“Threats are moving to the web and newer technologies such as VoIP and instant messaging,” warns Jeff Green, senior vice president of McAfee Avert Labs and product development. “Professional and organised criminals continue to drive a lot of the malicious activity. As they become increasingly sophisticated, it is more important than ever to be aware and secure when traversing the web.” He also points to compromises and malware at Salesforce.com, Monster.com and MySpace, among others, suggesting they represent a new trend in attacking online applications and social networking sites. Attackers are using Web 2.0 sites as a way to distribute malware and are data mining the web, looking for information people share to give their attacks more authenticity, he says – adding that McAfee expects a large increase in this activity next year. Meanwhile, with a handful of high-profile prosecutions of bot (programs that give cyber crooks full control over PCs) herders in 2007, Green expects criminals to seek better ways to cover their tracks in 2008. The Storm Worm (Nuwar) set a worrying precedent, he says. “The creators released thousands of variants and changed coding techniques, infection methods and social engineering schemes far more than any other threat in history. Storm created the largest peer-to-peer botnet ever.” McAfee expects others to ride on the coattails of that success, pushing up the number of PCs turned into bots. It also expects IM to come to mean ‘instant malware’, building on the long expected scenario of a ‘flash’ worm via instant messaging applications. “This threat could span millions of users and the globe in a matter of seconds,” warns Green. “There has been malware that spreads via IM, but we have yet to see such a self-executing threat. However, this may be closer than ever as the number of vulnerabilities in popular instant messaging applications more than doubled in 2007 compared to 2006.” More importantly, there were 10 high-severity risks in 2007, compared to none in 2006. Additionally, the top IM virus families of 2005 and 2006 were replaced with new active threats, signifying an out with the old and in with the new milestone. Skype saw its first batch of worms in 2007. Many more are expected to follow.