McAfee says digital and physical activism will collaborate in 2012
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Security research firm McAfee predicts that cyberattacks involving political motivation or notoriety will become major threats in 2012, according to a report released Wednesday.
McAfee’s 2012 Threat Predictions report finds that mobile banking, “legal” spam and virtual currency will make headlines in the new year.
“Many of the threats that will become prominent in 2012 have already been looming under the radar in 2011,” Vincent Weafer, senior vice president of McAfee Labs said in a statement. “Over the past year, the general public has become more aware of some of these risks, such as threats to critical infrastructure or the impact of hacktivism as they gain international media attention. In the meantime, we continue to see cybercriminals improving their toolkits and malware and are ready to make a significant impact in 2012.”
The report says that cybercriminals will target utilities systems (like the Stuxnet computer worm in 2010 that targeted industrial systems), and focus on mobile attacks as more users leverage mobile devices for banking. McAfee says more attackers will bypass PCs and go straight after mobile banking apps because of its heavy use.
While global spam volumes have dropped over the past two years, legitimate advertisers are using the same spamming techniques including buying customer databases from companies going out of business. According to McAfee, the technique is known as “snowshoe spamming.”
McAfee says that hacker group Anonymous will reinvent itself or die out in 2012, and the “digital disruptions” will collaborate with physical demonstrators and target public figures more than ever before. For example, the Occupy movement, while mostly a physical instance of activism, will integrate digitally.
While compromised digital certificates have been somewhat of a theme in 2011, McAfee says this trend of rogue certificates will continue in 2012. McAfee says the wide-scale targeting of certificate authorities and the broader use of fradulent digtal certificates will affect infrastructure, secure browsing and transactions.
To download a PDF of the full report, go here.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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