McAfee Inc, a leading dedicated security technology company, on Wednesday announced its top ten predictions for security threats in 2007 from McAfee Avert Labs. According to McAfee Avert Labs data, with more than 217,000 various types of known threats and thousands more not yet identified, it is clear that malware is increasingly being released by professional and organised criminals.
Malware or malicious software is a software designed to infiltrate and damage a computer system without the owner’s consent. The expression is a general term to mean various forms hostile, intrusive, or annoying software or programme code.
Computers are an essential part of everyday life. As a result there is a huge potential for monetary gains by virus writers. With sophisticated techniques on the rise, it is becoming increasingly hard for the general user to identify or avoid malware infections.
In no particular order, McAfee Avert Labs’ top ten security threats for 2007 are:
1. Number of password-stealing Web sites will increase using fake sign-in pages for popular online services
2. Volume of spam, particularly bandwidth-eating image spam, will rise
3. Popularity of video sharing on the Web makes it inevitable that hackers will target MPEG files
4. Mobile phone attacks will become more prevalent as mobile devices become smarter
5. Adware will go mainstream
6. Identity theft and data loss will continue to be a public issue
7. The use of bots will increase as a tool favoured by hackers
8. Parasitic malware, or viruses that modify existing files on a disk, will make a comeback
9. The number of rootkits on 32-bit platforms will increase
10. Vulnerabilities will continue to cause concern fueled by the underground market for vulnerabilities
