Facebook Accounts May Be More Valuable Than Credit Cards

Security experts predict that next year the industry will face a lot of new challenges, many of the things that until now have not been considered so important, will affect regular users and organizations worldwide.

Websense Security Labs released their predictions for 2012 concerning the threats that will target individuals and companies.

One of the most frightening things refers to the increase in value of social media accounts, which will be sold like warm bred in underground forums, since by possessing these accounts, crooks can manipulate the victim's friends and thus acquiring even more targets.

The advanced persistent attacks (APT) of 2012 are expected to rely on this since operations that make use of social media chat functionality are not uncommon, but they're estimated to become main attack vectors for APTs, along with mobile and cloud exploits.

Another prediction refers to the fact that social engineering, one of the most popular methods used by hackers in their operations, will rely more on new mobile features such as location-based services.

Since traditional enterprise security can't quite inspect encoded traffic, and since more secure sessions are utilized by popular websites, the more secure communication channels might turn against companies.

Organizations will rely more on containment, severing communications and data loss mitigation in their prevention policies.

The major events from next year, such as the US presidential elections, will be used as bait for many fake emails, tweets and websites that will pretend to belong to officials, but instead, they'll link to all sorts of locations that spread malware.

Finally, rogue anti-virus applications will still remain a serious issue, since crooks realized that they could gain a lot from launching such operations. By making use of symbols that belong to trusted and popular vendors, they can serve their products as premium quality merchandise that actually does nothing more but spread malware and collect undeserved payments from unsuspecting internauts.