Security threats paint a constantly evolving landscape, and there is no end in sight in terms of threats that keep appearing.  Enterprises have survived through extraordinary cycles of security threats: the 2003 “Summer of Worms;” the 2004 proliferation of DDoS-based cyber extortion of online betting sites, and the 2005/2006 rise of botnets used for spam, targeted-attacks and worse.  With the new calendars freshly hung on the wall, the question is, what security threats are on the rise for 2007? 

The Bulls-eye for Bad Guys - More Targeted Threats

Looking across the threat landscape, 2007 foresees more narrowly-defined threats or “targeted threats.” Targeted threats are different from what we have seen before -- they are more focused on individual information as opposed to mass-mailing worms that are sent over the Internet expected to randomly infect victims.  These targeted attacks can extract personalized information to later use in attacking a single person or company.

Targeted threats could be so narrowly-focused as to constitute industrial or even political espionage, trying to gain sensitive information from a single company or individual rather than the indiscriminate approach of letting a worm loose to randomly find victims wherever it may go.

Targeted attacks combine malware technology with social engineering, where an individual is lured, fooled or tricked through subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, manipulation to take some action that will ultimately result in damage or loss to that individual, his company, or organization, or to a third party.

Some attacks actually send the malware directly to the victim, perhaps as an email message attachment, and lure the user into executing the malware which will subsequently steal information from the victim.

Other attacks lure or trick he victim to download a file, such as a video, which might contain additional code or script instructions that can be used to steal identity information.   The recent Myspace.com “Quicktime worm” used this technique. 

More sophisticated attacks get the user to do nothing more than click a hyperlink to a specially crafted web site that knows how to install the malware on the victim PC without requiring any additional help from the victim to do so.  In this case the web site contains an exploit of a security vulnerability that exists in some of the software being used by the victim.

There are three factors pointing to the increased prevalence of targeted attacks in 2007: