Admin

McAfee's malware trends for 2007
December 4, 2006 @ 8:23:46 AM
By Ryan Paul

Anti-virus vendor McAfee has made a few predictions for 2007, providing insight into potential trends in digital security threats. According to the company, the malware market is becoming increasingly commercialized as organized crime groups fund development to generate profit. Financial competition has stimulated innovation, leading to broader use of sophisticated techniques like encryption and polymorphism.

Many of McAfee's predictions are unsurprising and relatively obvious. Phishing web sites that fraudulently claim to be popular web destinations like eBay in order to obtain users' passwords will become more common, transmission of spam will continue to escalate, bots and trojan horses will continue to increase in popularity, demand for vulnerabilities in the commercial malware community will continue to grow, adware will become more common, and identity thieves will continue to find innovative ways to get information.

The average technology consumer probably recognizes that those trends are nothing new, but there are also a few less-obvious vectors for attack that are going to become more popular as nascent technologies become mainstream. In particular, McAfee predicts that the rising popularity of smart phones will make mobile devices a more common target, and that broader consumer interest in digital video will give malware creators an incentive to find ways to deploy viruses and spyware in digital video files.

The pervasive use of wireless technologies like Bluetooth and 802.11b/g creates the potential for worms that can spread to other mobile devices surreptitiously. There are also concerns about computer viruses, like MSIL/Xrove.A, that use syncing technologies to infect mobile devices. McAfee predicts that malware writers will find ways to use memory cards to transmit viruses in 2007.