Posted on behalf of Paul Wood This week I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel with some of the best and the brightest among my Symantec colleagues to reflect on 2009’s threat landscape and what we anticipate for the year ahead. We concur that what we’ve seen this year was ugly. Botnets prevailed and took over as a primary means of spamming and spreading malware and social engineering attacks became more sophisticated. But what we also know is that this year pales in comparison to what 2010 is expected to bring: fast flux botnets will dominate, IM spam will rear its head, rogue security software vendors will up their game, fraud targeted at social networking apps will grow, new CAPTCHA bypass techniques will emerge... to name a few. That’s the bad news. The good news is that with a bit of preparation and the right security solutions in place, we can continue to outsmart the bad guys. So without further ado, I present to you Symantec’s 2010 Security Predictions. 2010 Security Predictions
Social Engineering as the Primary Attack Vector – More and more, attackers are going directly after the end user and attempting to trick them into downloading malware or divulging sensitive information under the auspice that they are doing something perfectly innocent. Social engineering’s popularity is at least in part spurred by the fact that what operating system and Web browser rests on a user’s computer is largely irrelevant, as it is the actual user being targeted, not necessarily vulnerabilities on the machine. Social engineering is already one of the primary attack vectors being used today, and Symantec estimates that the number of attempted attacks using social engineering techniques is sure to increase in 2010.
You can hear Symantec experts talking about our top 2009 trends and predictions for 2010 by clicking here: http://www.symantec.com/podcasts/detail.jsp?podid=b-2010_security_outlook