Cyber-criminals Increasingly Launch Spear Phishing Assaults: Cisco

Cisco recently released a report entitled "E-mail Attacks: This Time It's Personal," which finds that there's been a threefold increase in spear phishing assaults while malware and other scams have risen fourfold during the past twelve months leading to business and financial loss as well as remediation cost worth $1.29bn.

Essentially, the overall results have been included within a report that analysts with Cisco Security Intelligence Operations collected from polling 50 organizations and 361 IT professionals so they could study the trends of assaults as also how they affected organizations financially.

Most significantly, the analysts stated that cyber-criminals were excessively concentrating on low-volume though extremely refined personalized or spear phishing assaults. Evidence for these emanated from an outbreak of recent online attacks that reportedly targeted Google, Sony, Lockheed Martin and RSA.

In his remark about this discovery, Security Research Fellow Patrick Peterson at Cisco stated that most cyber attacks during 2011 had been from security breaches. Crn.com published this on June 30, 2011.

Moreover, alongside the issues stated above, the report further discusses the state of spam. Accordingly, bulk spam amounts sharply dropped to 40bn messages daily from 300bn during the past twelve months. Indeed, the conventional e-mail junk pipeline continues to remain; however, it has as well developed with more and more personalization, in particular within targeted assaults.

Remarking about this fascinating discovery, Director of Security Technology Business Unit Nick Edwards at Cisco stated that increased law enforcement services were undermining cyber-criminals' appeal for bulk spam assaults. Consequently, they were putting their effort and time more for targeted or spear phishing assaults of various kinds, he explained. Marketwire.com published this on June 30, 2011.

Eventually, the report states that ever-since distributed networks started, threats have been based on mass cyber assaults. Accordingly, spam, DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) assaults, and self-proliferating viruses are a few chosen means for causing business disruption and attaining monetary benefits. The attacker develops a single malware as well as uses it within multiple areas where victims may tread, usually by mistake, for instance contaminating websites, abusing software flaws, dispatching purchase-induced e-mails, and sending banking credential-stealing phishing e-mails.

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» SPAMfighter News - 7/8/2011