TACOMA, WA — (Marketwire) — 12/20/11 — , a provider of technology and services that help organizations secure their Internet presence, today released its predictions of the top Internet security trends for 2011. Highlighted areas of concern surround online voting, the London Summer Olympics and exploits of enterprise infrastructure.
“Cyber criminals have gotten much smarter about capitalizing on current events to swindle victims. In this sense, cyber criminals are acting just as much like psychologists and pollsters as thieves,” said IID president and CTO Rod Rasmussen. “In 2012, there are several events that cybercriminals have had years to prepare for.”
Below is the IID list of its top enterprise security risks to watch out for in 2012 (in no particular order):
1) London Summer Olympics cyber attacks — Heading into the 2012 London Summer Olympics, cybercriminals will look to capitalize on the hype by tricking people with phishing scams impersonating the Summer Olympics official website and/or official Summer Olympics vendors. Taking into account a recent by Microsoft that one in every 14 applications downloaded contains malicious software (malware), those attacks may not only try and get you to reveal personal information but may also try and get you to download malware. Once malware is on a victim-s computer, the perpetrator can monitor or control both personal and business computer activity — enabling them to steal data, send spam, and commit fraud.
2) Elections altered — With 2012 being a U.S. presidential election year, and many U.S. states allowing military and overseas voting via the Internet, cybercriminals are expected to try and take advantage. Whether it-s actually trying to alter votes or impersonate voting websites and emails with phishing and malware attacks, security incidents will occur. The greatest areas of concern involve direct attacks on voting machines, which have been shown in numerous examples to be easily accomplished; hacking of vote tally databases; or hijacking the network infrastructure between them all.
3) 12/21/2012 danger — Much has been and speculated about the Mayan “end of times” of December 21, 2012. Bank on the fact that cyber criminals will play into this fear through targeted phishing and malware attacks playing on people-s heightened awareness surrounding 12/21/2012.
4) Internet infrastructure attacks for financial gain — While hacktivism will persist, expect DNS (Domain Name System) and BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) attacks for financial gain to grab headlines in 2012. Indicative of this trend is the December 2010 DNS hijacking of large European payment processor ChronoPay in which cyber criminals collected at least 800 credit card numbers of its customers. More details surrounding this attack can be found at .
5) Physical infrastructure attacks carried out over the Internet — Expect to see real world infrastructure damage (power plants, utilities) and destruction of enterprises- physical assets, both threatened and caused, by hacking in 2012. We-ve already seen Stuxnet wreak havoc on the Iranian nuclear program. Duqu seems to be a follow-up, and there have been disputed reports of attacks against municipal utilities in the U.S. this year. Iran appears to have more advanced cyber security capabilities than formerly thought, and the U.S., European countries, and many other nations are ramping up their “offensive” cyber security capabilities and updating polices to allow for their deployment. Expect the criminal world to take advantage of cyber security holes to create real-world damage too, as they have long used techniques like DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to extort money from victims. A real-world consequence to a cyber-attack seems like too good an opportunity for criminals to pass up in order to expand their strong-arm extortion tactics.
IID (Internet Identity) has been providing technology and services that secure the Internet presence for an organization and its extended enterprise since the company was founded in 1996. It recently introduced a number of unique approaches to secure organizations- use of Internet infrastructure with ActiveTrust® BGP, ActiveTrust DNS, and ActiveTrust Resolver and TrapTrace. IID also provides anti-phishing, malicious software (malware) and brand security solutions for many of today-s leading financial services firms, and e-commerce, social networking and ISP companies, and more. The company is working hard to deliver solutions that help keep the Internet safe and trusted for businesses. IID is headquartered in Tacoma, Washington. More information can be found at .
Contact:
Andrew Goss
VOXUS Inc. (for IID)
253.444.5446
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