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SoftScan: Social Engineering Attacks to Grow in Sophistication in 2008
SoftScan's views of the year ahead
(M2 PressWIRE Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)
RDATE:17012008
London, UK -- SoftScan announced today that users should focus on
securing their online lifestyle in 2008, not just in the way they use
social networking and gaming sites, but in all aspects of online
services including bill payments, shopping and stock trading. SoftScan
also predicts that the amount of spam distributed will drop marginally
during the first half of 2008, only to rise once again later in the
year.
"Although social engineering will still be the preferred method to lure
people into infecting their computer or giving away password
information, the approaches themselves will become much more
sophisticated," comments Diego d'Ambra. "As criminals redouble their
efforts to improve response yields and ultimately increase turnover, we
expect to see highly targeted spam with content written specifically
for the recipient."
SoftScan believes that the majority of information used to create these
messages will be collected illegally from online services, which often
hold private and financial data that can then be exploited. In
addition, phishing attacks are likely to have a makeover too. Links
will redirect users to secure spoof sites that include key symbols such
as the padlock and allow the criminal to lead the user further into a
false sense of security.
Popular websites that include content and links from a large range of
third parties are also likely to be high on the list of malware
writers. Attacks have already been seen whereby advertising content
providers have inadvertently delivered malware via infected adverts or
the advert itself takes the users to a malicious website. SoftScan
expects that this type of threat will be developed further during the
course of 2008.
"Botnets will continue to play an important part in the dissemination
of spam and other types of attack and their 'success' may well inspire
others to start their own business," continues Diego d'Ambra. "If this
occurs, I think we will also see the criminals develop malware to try
to harvest each other's bots, proving that there is no honour among
thieves in the online world."
At the same time, SoftScan still expects to see plenty of the same old
tricks in 2008, with the Olympics, European Soccer Championship and the
US Presidential election being popular subjects with malware emails. In
addition, spammers will include a continuation of obfuscation
techniques to try and beat the anti-spam filters by using video clips
and the like to deliver spam messages.
About SoftScan
SoftScan provides a fully managed email security and archiving service
that relieves organisations from the burden of using internal
resources, whilst enabling full configurability to comply with company
policy. SoftScan's award-winning service protects over 1 million users
in more than 100 countries by combining three market leading virus
scanners with its proven heuristic scanner, Paranoid, to deliver one of
the most effective virus and spam filters in the world. Paranoid's
powerful, intelligent scanning capability enables it to stop viruses as
yet undetected by conventional scanners, delivering zero-day protection.
www.softscan.co.uk
CONTACT: Sara Claridge, Marylebone Media Relations
Tel: +44 (0)870 766 8482
Tel: +44 (0)7968 626838
e-mail: sara@marylebone.co.uk
WWW: http://www.marylebone.co.uk
((M2 Communications Ltd disclaims all liability for information
provided within M2 PressWIRE. Data supplied by named party/parties.
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Copyright ? 2008 M2 Communications Ltd.
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