Interim report: Top Cyber Threats - smarter targeted attacks, mobile threats, and social media identity thefts by cyber-criminals using Cloud services.

ome key trends identified in the study are:

• Cyber-criminals increasingly using advanced methods to implement attack techniques (vectors) that are non-traceable and difficult to take down. Anonymisation technologies and peer-to peer systems (so called distributed technologies) play an important role in this.  It is clear that mobile technology is increasingly exploited by cyber-criminals. Threats of all kinds that were encountered in the more traditional arena of IT will affect mobile devices and the services available on these platforms.

• The wide spread of mobile devices leads to an amplification of abuse based on knowledge/attack methods targeting social media.
• The availability of malware and cyber-hacking tools and services, together with digital currencies (e.g. Bitcoins) and anonymous payment services is opening up new avenues for cyber-fraud and criminal activity.
• There is a real possibility of large impact events when attacks combining various threats are successfully launched.
• As reported by ENISA in its report on major cyber attacks (2013/07/20), cyber-attack is the sixth most important cause of outages in telecommunication infrastructures, and it impacts upon a considerable number of users. Taking into account these incidents, and denial of service threat developments, we observe an increase in infrastructure threats in 2013.

https://www.enisa.europa.eu/media/press-releases/interim-report-top-cyber-threats-smarter-targeted-attacks-mobile-threats-and-social-media-identity-thefts-by-cyber-criminals-using-cloud-services#!