McAfee predicts next year's security threats

Internet users won't be able to drop their guard for a moment next year as malware and spam attacks increase in number and sophistication, warns McAfee

The security company's Avert Labs has released a podcast outlining its predictions of what it believes will be the 10 most serious threats that will menace people online next year.

Because professional and criminal gangs are increasingly involved in releasing malware, the majority of attacks are likely to be for financial gain.

McAfee therefore predicts a growth in what are called pharming attacks. These are where criminals spoof the sign-in pages of popular online services, such as Ebay and banks so people's personal information, such as passwords and account numbers can be stolen.

This will also help keep the issue of identity theft at the top of the agenda for most consumers.

Hackers will continue to find new ways to infect people's PCs with viruses and Trojans and other malware; for example the popularity of video sharing on the web makes it inevitable that hackers will target Mpeg files as a means to distribute malicious code, said McAfee

Spam will continue to remain a problem and is expected to increase in volume as the criminals make use of massive networks of zombie computers as mail servers.

Image-based spam, which is becoming increasingly popular as it helps spammers bypass email filters, will worsen the spam issue for both consumers, businesses and internet service providers. Typically these emails are three times the size of text-based spam, so this represents a significant increase in the bandwidth used by such messages.

To make it more difficult for the average computer user and the security industry, the hackers are using increasingly sophisticated techniques such as polymorphism, which means they make malware appear and work in many forms and rootkits.

Furthermore, attacks are likely to be encrypted to disguise their malicious purpose on a more rapid and complex scale.

McAfee believes that hackers will revert to older ways of infecting PCs. It predicts that parasitic malware, or viruses that modify existing files on a disk, will make a comeback. When the user runs the infected file, the virus runs too.

Adware will continue to plague consumers. Although McAfee hoped that when used for legitimate commercial concerns it is done in a way that is not objectionable to consumers, it warned that the misuse of this commercial software is on the rise.

As well as PCs, the company warned that mobile phone attacks, long predicted but rarely seen, could get a foothold next year as these devices become “smarter” and more connected.

"Within a short period of time, computers have become an intrinsic and essential part of everyday life, and as a result there is a huge potential for monetary gains by malware writers," said Jeff Green, senior vice-president of McAfee Avert Labs and product development.

"As we see sophisticated techniques on the rise, it's becoming increasingly hard for the general user base to identify or avoid malware infections."

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