New Year Predictions from McAfee

The security experts said that threats will be more professional in nature and said attacks will expand into the mobile phone and video markets.

The top ten security risks for 2007, according to McAfee, are (in no particular order):-

1. The number of password-stealing Web sites will increase using fake sign-in pages for popular online services such as eBay.

2. The volume of spam, particularly bandwidth-eating image spam, will continue to increase.

3. The popularity of video sharing on the Web makes it inevitable that hackers will target MPEG files as a means to distribute malicious code.

4. Mobile phone attacks will become more prevalent as mobile devices become "smarter" and more connected.

5. Adware will go mainstream following the increase in commercial Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs).

6. Identity theft and data loss will continue to be a public issue - at the root of these crimes is often computer theft, loss of back-ups and compromised information systems.

7. The use of bots, computer programs that perform automated tasks, will increase as a tool favored by hackers.

8. Parasitic malware, or viruses that modify existing files on a disk, will make a comeback.

9. The number of rootkits on 32-bit platforms will increase, but protection and remediation capabilities will increase as well.

10. Vulnerabilities will continue to cause concern fueled by the underground market for vulnerabilities.

"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."

Tags: malware, McAfee, security, security concerns, virus