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

22 Sept 2013

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.