The Global Business Security division of IBM has taken the initiative to study the security threat posed by viruses and worms. It presented a report summarizing last year’s instances and has forecast worse threats for the current year.
In the year 2004, corporate networks were the worst hit by email-based worms and various types of nasty computer virus strains, such as Bagle, Netsky and Mydoom.
The IT departments of many companies have thrown up their hands in despair on being unable to combat viruses such as Mydoom and Netsky particularly.
At the individual user level too, there have been a growing number of identity thefts like ‘phising’ attacks that came in the guise of e-mail and fraudulent websites deceiving recipients into divulging important personal information like credit card number, account usernames, social security numbers and even passwords.
IBM warns that such phising attacks will continue to plague consumers all through 2005.
The past year revealed a whole lot of vulnerabilities that affected digital picture formats such as JPEG and BMP photos.
Hackers had devised ways to embed malicious code in pictures in order to attack a number of different applications that were used to work on images. In a typical case, a recipient would be conned into clicking on an infected image which would set off a virus or a worm and the user would never know how or when the virus attacked.
It warns also that these malicious software writers have gone smarter and decided to upgrade their strategies too. They are now looking past the traditional IT space. Their next targets are going to be handheld devices, cellphones, wireless networks and embedded computers which include car and satellite communication systems.
The aggressive spread of viruses and worms may prove difficult to contain, if last year’s record is any indication. Last year the number of phising attacks and known viruses grew unabated despite the CANSPAM Act.
Spammers and hackers will be employing basic software development practices to spread their destructive software; they will soon be shifting focus, if they haven’t already done so, from PCs and servers and networks to Bluetooth and other wireless technologies that connect mobile devices.
A spokesperson for IBM’s security strategy division said “The best thing we can do is to keep one step, technologically, ahead of them. Future technologies will have to devise new ways to secure communication devices and systems.”
