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John Danenbarger
McAfee’s Annual Malware report stresses some extra unnerving information:
“This year we saw an increase in the sophistication of some threats. ‘Signed’ malware that imitates legitimate files will become more prevalent in 2011. This will cause an increase in stolen keys as well as the techniques and tools to forge fake keys to use in these types of attacks.
“’Friendly fire’ in which threats appear to come from friends via social media such as Koobface and VBMania will continue to grow. This will go hand-in-hand with the increased abuse of social networks, which will eventually overtake email as a leading attach vector.
“We also expect to see an increase in “smart bomb” attacks, those designed to trigger under certain conditions but not others. These threats require victims to follow the designated attack path, i.e. thwarting honeypots, crawlers, and security researcher, while greatly impacting designated and vulnerable targets. Such threats will create an even greater need for Global Threat Intelligence to defend against attacks observed under specific circumstances.
“Personalized attacks are about to get a whole lot more personal.”
We have a client (of whom we cannot rid ourselves, as much as we try) who refuses to understand anything about how his computer system can become a danger to everyone else. So until some malware actually jams up his system to the point of not running at all, he merrily continues to spew out bots and malware to each and every customer and friend. This would not even be a problem if he were not so cheap as to spend money on an anti-virus system and then KEEP IT UP TO DATE!
Almost all of the anti-malware systems today are quite good. The competition is huge. I use a professional version of AVG, but I have no preferrence. Everything I read about the competing systems seems positive.
As hopefully you know, most protective systems today are downright automatic if you are willing to pay a small fee. In the meantime, if you don’t, you are hurting everyone to whom you are connected.
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