Hacktivists. What Are They? Will They Lead to Revolution? The Future Came True.

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McAfee Labs report continues...

"We expect that social networks will be used more often to bring hacktivism into play next year.  Just as cyber-crime has moved from isolated individuals (able to create a piece of malware) to unstructured groups (able to launch a DDoS), we expect to see much more and stronger organization and structure with hacktivist groups in 2011."

Now to something VERY interesting.  Did the lab forecast the future or what?  This was written BEFORE the Tunisian and Egyptian demonstrations.

 

"Hacktivism will become the new way to demonstrate your political position in 2011 and beyond.  Transitioning from the streets, political organizers will move to the Internet to launch attacks and send messages in broad daylight or Internet time.  And as in the physical world, we expect that hacktivist attacks will inspire and foment riots and other real-world demonstrations."

McAfee could not guess that this would all happen in 2010.  What the McAfee Labs did not say is that in countries where computers are not commonplace, the cell phone has been used.  So all that is said above applies to the phone as well.

I wanted to make an April Fools joke, but the subject is too serious. 

 

 

Hacktivists. What Are They? Will They Lead to Cyberwar?

I am continuing to show you the McAfee Labs report, not because you can do anything about cyberwar and Denial of Service threats, but because you might be interested in knowing about them, especially when they come on the news.
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The McAfee Labs report continues, "Attacks motivated by politics are not new, but we encounter them more and more regularly.  And they will be far more numerous in 2011.  In addition to defacement (the primary activity of Hacktivists) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS, the latest fashionable activity), new kinds of sophisticated attacks will appear. 

"Information theft, stolen and then disclosed to discredit political opponents, will certainly increase.  More groups will repeat the Wikileaks example, as hackitivism is conducted by people claiming to be independent of any particular government or movement.

"Whether governments drive these manipulations and activities covertly is open to debate, but it is likely enough that states will adopt a privateer model.  Hackitivism as a diversion could be the first step in cyberwarfare.  Everyone within information security, from journalists to researchers, will have to be vigilant to recognize the difference between hacktivism and the beginning of a cyberwar."

More tomorrow.

 

Your Business Needs a Mobile Phone Policy. Why?

I quote McAfee again: "Threats to mobile devices have been a hot topic within the security community for several years.  We expect attacks to erupt at any time, yet they never quite seem to happen. 

 

"Nonetheless, McAfee Labs predicts that 2011 will be a turning point for threats to mobile devices.  This year we saw many new, but low-prevalence, threats to mobile devices...rootkits for the Android platform, remote jailbreaking exploits for the iPhone, and the arrival of Zeus (a well-known banking Trojan/botnet). 

"The widespread adoption of mobile devices into business environments combined with these and other attacks is likely to bring about the explosion that we have long anticipated.  Given our historically fragile cellular infratstructure and slow strides toward encryption, user and corporate data may face serious risks."

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Wow!  Yikes!  The traffic of the so-called cyberspace is moving to mobile.  Why would not the cybercriminals to the same?

It would not surprise me to learn that most of your company staff have quite advanced mobile phones, including the top executive.  And it would not surprise me if no policy is established for the use of these phones. 

The number one policy is to establish what programs and apps can an employee have?  But then, how can you control that?  Any comments?

 

Locative Services are Booming and Will Go Boom!

Okay, I am a sourpuss at the party.  I think the locative services like Foursquare are going to backfire in big way.  Right now they are a teenage toy, but...well, read this quote from McAfee's annual reporting on malware:

"Locative Service Abuse: More Internet users at all levels are adding global positioning system (GPS) information to their social media updates so that their friends and colleagues can see where they are.  Many locative services also offer users badges and rewards to increase their popularity. 

"There is no trick to imagining how cybercriminals and scammers can potentially leverage this infromation.  With locative services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places, you can easily search, track, and plot the whereabouts of friends and strangers.  Use Bing's mapping functionality, for example, and plot all the GPS'enabled tweets in an area.  It is easy to correlate these by topic or area of interest. 

"In just a few clicks cybercriminals can see in real time who is tweeting and where, what they are saying, what their interests are, and the operating systems and applications they are using.  It then become child's play to craft a targeted attack based upon what the bad guys have just learned from these services.

"The fact that these services allow ayone to see and track individuals and groups, including their likes and dislikes, affiliations and interests, and then act on them in Internet time, will make this topic a huge focus for cybercriminals and scammers in 2011 and beyond."

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So speaking as the party-pooper that I am, I think something has to change soon, or it will be changed after major calamity.  Am I wrong?