Cybercriminals will target social networking sites and third-party applications, use more complex Trojans and botnets to build and execute attacks, and take advantage of HTML 5 to create emerging threats, according to 2010 threat predictions report from McAfee.
According to McAfee, social networks will be a platform of choice for emerging threats in 2010. Facebook, Twitter and third-party applications on these sites are giving cybercriminals new technologies to work with and hot spots of activity that can be exploited. McAfee Labs predicts that cybercriminals will increasingly use the tactics across the most popular social networking sites in 2010.
HTML 5 will continue to shift user activity from desktop to online applications. This along with the Google Chrome OS will give another opportunity for malware writers to prey on users, the firm said.
The firm said that the banking trojans and email attachments delivering malware will increase in volume and sophistication; and cybercriminals will continue to target adobe reader and flash. It expects Adobe product exploitation will likely surpass that of Microsoft Office applications in 2010.
In 2010, McAfee also expects to see a significant adoption of peer-to-peer control, a distributed and resilient botnet infrastructure, rather than the centralized hosting model.
However, the firm said that it has seen significant progress in the universal effort to identify, track, and combat cybercrime by governments worldwide and also expects to see many more successes in the pursuit of cybercriminals in 2010.
Jeff Green, senior vice president of McAfee Labs, said: “Over the past decade, we’ve seen a tremendous improvement in the ability to successfully monitor, uncover, and stop cybercrime. We’re now facing emerging threats from the explosive growth of social networking sites, the exploitation of popular applications and more advanced techniques used by cybercriminals, but we’re confident that 2010 will be a successful year for the cybersecurity community.”
