Cyber-criminals preferring Corporate Network Assaults over Bulk Spam: Cisco

Cisco, which has just released its "2011 State-of-Security Report," observes that cyber-criminals prefer more-and-more of drone-like surveillance assaults against corporate networks to clandestinely-built armies of compromised PCs called botnets through which they can commandeer malware and/or spam campaigns.

Notably, the general count of PCs and networks that online-criminals compromised worldwide has declined annually starting 2009. That's because law enforcement globally has been able to successfully terminate massive botnets as also at times catch the perpetrators, Cisco reports. For instance, the Spanish and Slovenian police, together with the FBI, detained all who controlled and operated a botnet built with 12m infected PCs.

Moreover, starting 2009, the Global Adversary Resource Market Share Index of Cisco for tracing hijacked computers has come down to 6.5 from 7.2. This fall, instead of indicating that cyber-crime has become les, suggests that the criminals are moving towards capturing extremely sensitive e-docs out of the computer systems of manufacturing and defense sector companies on behalf of organizations, which remunerate very well, away from launching large-scale attacks. The new targets aren't only less risky but more lucrative too.

Threat Research Manager Scott Olechowski for Cisco stated that the practice was getting to be an accurate, killer-like strategy in contrast to an atrocious, carpet-bomb like approach. Eweek.com reported this dated December 14, 2011.

Further, according to Cisco, there's been a decline in junk e-mails from over 379bn e-mails/day to approximately 124bn e-mails/day during August 2010-November 2011, with the scales never like since 2007.

Intriguingly, the report as well explains the way junk e-mail amount has declined over geographical areas. Thus USA, which for instance, was the greatest distributor of spam during 2010, has slid to No.9, while currently India ranks No.1 in spam distribution, with Vietnam, Russia, South Korea and Indonesia following, serially.

Nonetheless, despite the increase in spam within certain countries, it does not imply that the problem of e-mail junk continues to be the same like before. The reason being that more organizations are taking the assistance of security and law enforcement officials with some even attaining success like Yahoo which recently was awarded USD610m under a lawsuit against spammers.

Related article: Cyber Child abuser Sentenced To Imprisonment

» SPAMfighter News - 12/24/2011