“With target audiences so large, financing mechanisms so convenient, and cyber-talent so accessible, robust innovation in criminal technology and tactics will continue its surge forward in 2014,” said Vincent Weafer, Senior VP, McAfee Labs.
“The activity in mobile and social is representative of an increasing ‘black hat’* focus on the fastest growing and most digitally active consumer audiences, in which personal information is almost as attractive as banking passwords. The emergence and evolution of advanced evasion techniques represents a new enterprise security battlefront, where the hacker’s deep knowledge of architectures and common security tactics enable attacks that are very hard to uncover.”
McAfee Labs foresees the following trends in 2014:
1. Mobile malware* will drive growth in both technical innovation and the volume of attacks in the overall malware “market” in 2014. In the last two quarters reported, new PC malware growth was nearly flat, while appearances of new Android samples grew by 33%.
With businesses and consumers continuing their shift to mobile, McAfee Labs expects to see ransomware aimed at mobile devices, attacks targeting near-field communications (NFC) vulnerabilities, and attacks that corrupt valid apps to extract data without being detected.
2. Virtual currencies will fuel malicious ransomware attacks around the world. Virtual currencies provide cybercriminals with a conveniently unregulated and anonymous payment infrastructure through which to collect money from victims. Currencies such as Bitcoin will enable and accelerate new generations of ransomware such as the Cryptolocker threat of 2013.
3. Criminal gangs and state actors will deploy new stealth attacks that will be harder than ever to identify and stop. There will be broad adoption of advanced evasion techniques, such as the use of sandbox*-aware attacks that do not fully deploy unless they believe they are running directly on an unprotected device. Other attack technologies will include return-oriented programming attacks that cause legitimate applications to behave in malicious ways, self-deleting malware that covers its tracks after subverting a target, and advanced attacks on dedicated industrial control systems targeting public and private infrastructure.
4. Social platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, will be used more aggressively to target the finances and personal information of consumers, and the intellectual property and trade secrets of business leaders.
McAfee Labs expects to see more attacks that leverage social platform features to capture passwords or data about user contacts, location, or business activities. Such information can be used to target advertising or perpetrate virtual or real-world crimes. Either directly or through third parties, enterprises will increasingly use “reconnaissance attacks” to capture valuable user and organisational information to gain tactical and strategic advantages.
5. In 2014, new PC attacks will exploit application vulnerabilities in HTML5, a standard which allows websites to come alive with interaction, personalisation, and rich capabilities. On the mobile platform, McAfee Labs is predicting attacks that will breach the browser’s “sandbox” and give attackers direct access to the device and its services. Cybercriminals will increasingly target vulnerabilities below* the operating system, in the storage stack and even in the BIOS*.
6. The evolving threat landscape will dictate adoption of big data security analytics to meet detection and performance requirements. In 2014, security vendors will continue to add new threat-reputation services and analytics tools that will enable them and their users to identify stealth and advanced persistent threats faster and more accurately than can be done today with basic “blacklisting”* and “whitelisting”* technologies.
7. Deployment of cloud-based corporate applications will create new attack surfaces that will be exploited by cybercriminals. Cybercriminals will look for more ways to exploit the ubiquitous hypervisors* found in all data centres, the multi-tenant access and communications infrastructure implicit in cloud services, and management infrastructure used to provision and monitor large-scale cloud services.
Because they lack sufficient leverage to demand security measures in line with their organisational needs, small businesses that purchase cloud-based services will continue to grapple with security risks that are not addressed by cloud providers’ user agreements and operating procedures.
For a full copy of the 2014 Predictions Report from McAfee Labs, click here.
*There is a lot of functionality 'below' the operating system which controls fundamental activities such as how data is stored onto a drive, how bright your display is, and what the computer does when the power switch is pressed. This is against the activities 'above' the operating system, such as starting up software like Microsoft Office, playing music when music file is clicked, etc.
*BIOS refers to the code that controls the chips on the motherboard.
*Black hat hackers are malicious versus white hat hackers who may hack so as to inform organisations of vulnerabilities.
*Blacklisting avoids everything in the blacklist as it is not approved, whereas whitelisting embraces everything in the whitelist as it is pre-approved.
*Hypervisors control how data is stored on physical machines so as to create what is known as a cloud, where data can be stored and delivered anytime, anywhere, on any device.
*Malware refers to malicious software.
*Ransomware is malicious software that causes a problem which can only be fixed through paying the hackers money.
*Sandboxes separate suspicious software from the existing system. The suspect software is tested in the sandbox, and only introduced into the system if it is found to be harmless.
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