Category: Trends

The report includes real documented discussions conducted by the company’s researchers with resellers of stolen data and their “bosses”, confirming it’s analysis of the current state of the cybercrime economy.

“Over the course of the last 18 months we have been watching the profit-driven Cybercrime market maturing rapidly… This makes businesses today even more vulnerable for cybercrime attacks, especially considering the maturity of the cybercrime market and its well-structured cybercrime organizations,” said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, Finjan’s CTO.

The report explores the trend of loosely organized clusters of hackers trading stolen data online being replaced by hierarchical cybercrime organizations. These organizations deploy sophisticated pricing models, Crimeware business models refined for optimal operation, Crimeware drop zones, and campaigns for optimal distribution of the Crimeware. These cybercrime organizations consist of strict hierarchies, in which each cybercriminal is rewarded according to his position and task. Directly under him is the “underboss”, acting as the second in command and managing the operation. This individual provides the Trojans for attacks and manages the Command and Control (C&C) of those Trojans.

As a preventative measure, businesses should look closely at their security practices to make sure they are protected.

http://www.security-industry-today.com/news/news_all.asp?ID_key=381

Many other protocol implementations are built entirely from scratch, and have not benefited from years of public analysis and repeated attack, resulting in unproven protocol implementations that may be vulnerable to attack.

Even when vulnerabilities are identified, patches must be developed for each device or device family by the vendor, requiring tight collaboration between embedded software developers and the OEM’ s building devices based on the developers’ software.

http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=6247

The report summarizes the latest trends in the cybercrime marketplace over the first six months of 2008.

One of the biggest among those trends is the growing commoditization of some kinds of stolen data, according to Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer at Finjan. Until recently, he said, credit card numbers and bank accounts with personal identification numbers (PIN) were considered valuable items in the underground market.

Technologies from Citrix Systems Inc. are being used by an increasing number of health care organizations to enable remote network access, Ben-Itzhak said, and stealing Citrix log-in credentials often allows data thieves to gain single sign-on access to a wide range of health-related information from inside hospital networks.

There’s a growing focus on stealing log-in credentials that provide remote access to business networks as well. For instance, Finjan recently discovered a Argentina-based server containing over 500MB of stolen data and another server containing over 1.4GB of similar information in Malaysia. For instance, one of the servers had a cache of data that included passenger reservation data and flight scheduling information stolen from a major airline.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9100338&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1

“We can’t control everything [in the network] anymore,” MacDonald says.

Among the key features of an adaptive security infrastructure are security platforms that share and correlate information rather than point solutions, so the heuristics system could communicate its suspicions to the firewall, for example. “Then the firewall could block the IP address” while the signature-based scanner could create a new signature for the threat, MacDonald says.

Other features would be finer-grained controls, automation (in addition to human intervention), on-demand security services, security as a service, and integration of security and management data.

A major change with this model of real-time, adaptive security is shifting authorization management and policy to an on-demand service that contains details and policy enforcement that matches compliance and can adapt to the user’s situation when he or she is trying to access an application, for instance.

MacDonald admits that the reality of an adaptive security infrastructure seems futuristic and faces plenty of challenges in adoption, but there are some of the building blocks available today, such as virtualization, authorization management, and deep packet inspection, for example.

Among the trends driving this vision is the increase in targeted attacks, as well as what Gartner sees as an explosion in the number of perimeters given mobile users, network guests, and business partners, for instance.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=155538&f_src=darkreading_section_296

· 86 percent of respondents indicate that cyber crime has become a concern.

To help stem the tide, the survey recommends that a national cyber crime center be established where law enforcement and other agencies can work together to combat the problem.

http://www.securityinfowatch.com/article/article.jsp?siteSection=364&id=15726

“Customer and public confidence will drive security up the priority list, based on the increasing impact that evolving threats have on the reputation and issues relating to privacy violations,” stated the report stated.

About three-quarters of the security practitioners polled believe that worm and virus attacks are the top threat to their systems, followed by external attackers and inside employees. Half of those polled planned to gain additional training in security administration, and approximately a third planned to study either application and system-development security or network security.

http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/732?ref=rss