A Cybercriminal’s Resolutions

By Stephanie Jordan
in

With New Year’s coming up, our friends at Symantec Hosted Services offered a glimpse into what a cybercriminal’s New Year’s resolution list might look like. Here are possible goals, many of which build upon the successes of 2009.

  1. Control the Strongest Botnet—Botnets ruled the cyber security landscape in 2009, with the 10 major heavyweight spam-sending botnets (including Cutwail, Rustock and Mega-D) now controlling at least 5 million compromised computers. With these compromised computers issuing over 83 percent of the 107 billion spam messages distributed globally, Symantec expects botnets to get bigger, stronger and more intelligent in the year ahead.
  2. Crack the CAPTCHA—CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computer and Humans Apart) breaking tools have allowed cybercriminals access to an unprecedented number of Webmail, IM and social networking Web sites. With a new crop of more sophisticated CAPTCHAs on the horizon—some involving images and animation—it will be increasingly difficult for the bad guys to solve these puzzles with an automatic computer program.
  3. Brush Up on My Pop Culture—World events, news, and holidays always spark a bad guy’s imagination. In 2009, spammers and malware writers jumped on the news of the H1N1 virus and the death of Michael Jackson. Expect to see more celebrity names in the junk folder next year.
  4. Discover the Next Big Social Network—The popularity of social networking and micro-blogging sites have led spammers to use short URLs in their spam emails. In 2009, over 90 percent of spam contained a URL and there was an upsurge of short URLs in the second half of the year. Short URLs hide the true Web site behind the link, yet are trusted by millions of people who use them to share photos and news online. Symantec believes new social technologies will lead to even more creativity on behalf of the bad guys.
  5. Learn a Foreign Language—Automated translation services allow cybercriminals to target their attacks in local languages. While over 95 percent of spam is in English, the last year has seen significant increases in spam in countries where English was not the primary language. After English, the most common languages for spam (in order) are French, Portuguese, Russian and German. Symantec reports that spam levels in Germany and The Netherlands increased by 13 percent since the beginning of the year, with spam now accounting for an excess of 95 percent of all emails.

While hope springs eternal in a New Year, it seems that we can, in the estimation of Symantec along with many other industry insiders, expect more of the same when it comes to online threats in 2010.

Published December 21, 2009