More localized malware

Relative to the country’s size, it’s rather surprising that South Australia (SA) is ranked 26th in the world with regard to the amount of command-and-control servers it hosts. This fact is surely concerning, for it shows that SA is either extensively used by overseas attackers, or there has been an obvious increase in local bot masters. 

As far as broadband is now becoming faster, cheaper and more accessible locally, the amount of local command-and-control serves should become as well. According to itweb.co.za a trend was noticed that malware is becoming more localized, for example, spam is targeted at specific users based on their location; this also includes the use of language, culture and events. For instance it is believed that a lot of spam related to World Cup 2010 will be received.

Moreover, cyber-crime is becoming more structured, for hackers and spammers have something similar to “business” roles within their organizations. Targeting specific individuals is becoming a great part of their successful activities as well. Cyber-crime explosion is also caused by the availability of malware toolkits, which are available for anyone on the internet.  

These kits are becoming a huge problem, for new versions are being released and it takes time to create security software against it. Moreover, not only kits for spam are available, but toolkits for phishing, which seems to become a popular and really dangerous part of cyber crime.

Itweb.co.za also stated that another trend since the introduction of web 2.0, is hackers going after web applications’ vulnerabilities (such as Java applets and other plug-ins), instead of the operating systems, which have become more secure and more of a challenge.

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