Trick or Threat?

The month of October in the threat landscape is often associated with scary social engineering tactics in time for Halloween. As in years past, the threats that lurk in and plague the current threat landscape are real. Most of them can cause irreparable damage, often resulting in information, or worse, identity theft as shown in the following blog entries:

Weather Report for Halloween: High Chances of a Storm
“Halloween Costumes” Bring More Fright Than Expected

But just how scary is the Web 2.0 environment nowadays? Let us run down a list of the scariest threats thus far:

2009 saw the emergence or resurfacing of three of the most notorious botnets in relation to information, financial, and identity theft—Koobface, ZeuS, and Ilomo. Botnets control more compromised machines than previously believed. Only a handful of cybercriminals have more than 100 million computers under their control. This means they have more computing power at their disposal than the entire world’s supercomputers combined. It’s no wonder then that more than 90% of all email worldwide is now spam.
Koobface is most known for preying on social networking and micro-blogging site users. It has transcended from its original design of taking over accounts to spread malicious links using the affected users’ credentials to spreading a FAKEAV or its variant to users who just happen to (continue reading...)