McAfee Inc. revisited its top ten predictions for security threats in 2007. Research from McAfee Avert Labs shows that threats including data-thieving phishing Web sites are on the rise, as expected. However, other pests such as remote-controlled bots show unpredicted signs of decrease.
Jeff Green, senior vice president of McAfee Avert Labs and product development, said, as we approach the mid-year mark, we wanted to check on our crystal ball gazing skills. As we predicted, professional and organized criminals continue to drive a lot of the malicious activity on the Net. However, we were surprised that mobile malware and image spam tapered off.
McAfee Avert Labs’ top security threats for 2007 and updates are:
Password-stealing Web sites are on the rise. The number of phishing Web sites continues to rise exponentially. McAfee Avert Labs saw a 784 per cent increase in phishing Web sites in the first quarter of 2007, with no slowdown in sight. These Web sites typically use fake sign-in pages for popular online services such as online auctions sites, online payment processors or online banking. Avert Labs anticipates increasing abuse of sites meant for online collaboration such as wiki pages and online applications.
Even Internet archive sites will suffer.
Spam, particularly image spam, is on the rise.
The total amount of spam caught in McAfee Avert Labs’ traps has stayed fairly flat during the first part of the year. Image spam accounted for up to 65 per cent of all spam at the beginning of 2007. It has actually dropped recently. Image spam is junk e-mail that includes an image instead of just text. It is used typically to advertise stocks, pharmaceuticals and degrees. The image can triple the size of a single message. This causes a significant increase in the bandwidth used by spam messages. In November 2006, image spam accounted for up to 40 per cent of the total spam received. It was less than ten percent a year earlier.
