The Top Ten Security Threats for 2008 (Part 7)
Another top ten cybersecurity threat for 2008:
— Criminal use of botnets and botnet-like technologies.
One of most profitable criminal enterprises on the Internet are botnets. Botnets are used by criminals to blast out phishing scams, spam, malware. and denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Many security experts believe that botnets are now a greater threat than viruses and worms. Botnets can have hundreds of thousands of nodes under the control of the botherder, making botnets a very profitable cybercrime enterprise. Criminals often rent their botnet services to other criminals for big money.
Making matters worse, the vulnerability-threat window, the time from the discovery of a vulnerability to exploitation of that vulnerability, has dramatically decreased, so botnets can grow very large, very fast, in what I call viral-exploitation.
Today, all online businesses face the threat of extortion, terrorism, phishing and spam by criminal botnets.
Please stay tuned for more of the top 10 cybersecurity threats for 2008 – and thank you for reading, and don’t forgot to make your your systems are up-to-date with the latest patches!
