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Submitted by: Bill Hickey
NCVA List Master

NRT-0214 Computer Security Assessment:

Researchers with McAfee's Anti-Virus Emergency Response Team (AVERT) labs say online criminals looking for new areas to attack in the next few years will find green fields in the Internet infrastructure and the digital home. McAfee offered its take on the top security trends for 2007, at a press event in San Francisco, saying that well-known problems such as phishing, spam, bots, and rootkits are on the rise, but in the years ahead, new areas will be top concerns. The virus research manager at McAfee's AVERT labs said, "In the short term, it will be the infrastructure side of things, " and "in the long term, it will be digital entertainment." As consumers get more comfortable down- loading and playing movies and games on home entertainment computers, that may also give hackers a new way to attack, he said. McAfee says that video on the web is already being hit with attacks. In March, the company reported that the MySpace page for the French band Mamasaid had been infected and was downloading malicious code hidden in a QuickTime file. On the infrastructure side, he pointed to a recent flaw in Windows DNS servers, which was exploited in a small number of online attacks, is a good example of things to come. These servers are a critical part of the Internet's infrastructure, used to convert the domain names users type into their browsers into the IP addresses that identify computers on the Internet. Microsoft patched the DNS flaw in April, shortly after the attacks began. McAfee also expects to see hackers focus more on WiFi attacks as PC users become accustomed to connecting to wireless networks wherever they go.

(IDG News Service 20JUN07)

Last Modified: Saturday, 14-Jul-2007 08:25:25 EDT