Windows Infections 2.0 Not a Rumor Anymore

Security companies from all over the world prepare their predictions for 2008 related to the security threats which are expected to evolve next year. One of the most interesting report comes from Finjan Inc., the company that predicts an avalanche of threats over the Web 2.0 technologies with more powerful and bad-intended attempts. Until now, the traditional web threats included the old-fashioned spam assaults, hacking attacks and phishing, but with more and evolved techniques, the illegal online activities tend to grow up. And they will conquer Web 2.0 soon enough, security company Finjan informed.

In fact, we have already seen signs of such an evolution. Remember the blog attacks, the comments spam or the hacks over the social networking profiles? This looks like the beginning of a new trend on the web, so new security tools are required.

"Building on the trend over the past year whereby financial reward has been driving the evolution of malicious code, 2008 will bring new threats that leverage advanced Web 2.0 techniques and services", said Finjan CTO Yuval Ben-Itzhak.

"Attacks will become more sophisticated by combining several services in order to heighten infection ratios and decrease the detection rate, while providing more robust and scalable attack frameworks. The focus will be on Trojan technology as it enables maximum flexibility in terms of command and control. This adds another potentially malicious element to the 'legitimate' web traffic that needs to be examined by security solutions".

What's more interesting is that Finjan predicts an increase of the attacks OVER most Web 2.0 technologies including social networks, blogs, mashups and RSS feeds. Although I didn't saw any RSS attack yet, I wonder if there's any chance to block them as they could easily trick a user to visit a malicious page and infect his computer with all sorts of dangerous files.

"Criminals and attackers are arming their crimeware Trojans with new covert communication channels designed to evade detection by traditional security products", the Finjan official continued.