2006: “The Year of Computing Dangerously”
December 28th, 2006The Washington Post has an article calling 2006 the “year of computing dangerously.”
Here are some excerpts from the article:
* “Computer security experts say 2006 saw an unprecedented spike in junk e-mail and sophisticated online attacks from increasingly organized cyber crooks. These attacks were made possible, in part, by a huge increase in the number of security holes identified in widely used software products. … Few Internet security watchers believe 2007 will be any brighter for the millions of fraud-weary consumers already struggling to stay abreast of new computer security threats and avoiding clever scams when banking, shopping or just surfing online.”
* “One of the best measures of the rise in cyber crime this year is spam. More than 90 percent of all e-mail sent online in October was unsolicited junk mail messages, according to Postini, a San Carlos, Calif.-based e-mail security firm. The volume of spam shot up 60 percent in the past two months alone as spammers began embedding their messages in images to evade junk e-mail filters that search for particular words and phrases.”
* “Data showing that criminal groups have shifted their activities from nights and weekends to weekday attacks, suggesting that online crime is evolving into a full-time profession for many.”
* The world’s largest software maker, Microsoft Corp., this year issued software updates to fix 97 security holes that the company assigned its most dire “critical” label, meaning hackers could use them to break into vulnerable machines without any action on the part of the user. … In contrast, Microsoft shipped just 37 critical updates in 2005.”
* “Some software security vendors suspect that a new Trojan horse program that surfaced last month, dubbed “Rustock.B” by some anti-virus companies, may serve as the template for malware attacks going forward. The program morphs itself slightly each time it installs on a new machine in an effort to evade anti-virus software. In addition, it hides in the deepest recesses of the Windows operating system, creates invisible copies of itself, and refuses to work under common malware analysis tools in an attempt to defy identification and analysis by security researchers.” … “This is about the nastiest piece of malware we’ve ever seen, and we’re going to be seeing more of it,” said Alex Eckelberry, president of Clearwater, Fla. based security vendor Sunbelt Software.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/22/AR2006122200367.html
December 28th, 2006 at 11:03 am
This just goes to show that we really do need a more secure computing platform of some kind (now more than ever). Whether it be an operating system that doesn’t let you run anything without asking you first (even as root) or some sort of hardware that has extra security measures built-in or even something totally new. It is obvious that the end-user cannot be trusted with his own computer, we need to redesign the entire computer somehow from the ground up to stop this nonsense.