The Hindu Business Line : TrendLabs sees explosive growth in Web threats

Coimbatore, Aug. 23 Trend Micro’s global threat research and support organisation – TrendLabs – while taking note of the changes in the style, motive and target of malware attacks, foresees an explosive growth in Web threats and little abatement in messaging threats in the coming months.

“The era of the global malware outbreak is over. Today’s threats are stealthy (remain undetected), regional and targeted (go after users in a specific region or country), blended and sequential (by using a combination of malwares), Web-based and profit-driven,” TrendLabs has stated in its ‘Semi-annual Threat Roundup and Forecast’ report.

In the first six months of this year, it has tracked several examples of how the threat landscape evolved including “Storm” at the beginning of the year and the “Italian Job” more recently in June.

It also saw file infectors taking on new roles, social engineering techniques becoming adept at leveraging current affairs, phishing scams targeting smaller regional establishments and authentic looking email messages carrying malware.

The report noted the renewed vigilant-style interest in undiscovered application and OS vulnerabilities and introduction of such malware in the wild, challenging software developers.

The most disturbing development, according to TrendLabs, “is the persistent rise in the use of bots and botnets to distribute spam and malware and perpetrate cyber crimes.”

Newer methods

To provide a comprehensive and reliable analysis, it is examining newer methods for analysing and understanding the evolving threat landscape. These include threats arising due to infrastructure vulnerabilities (originating from the existence of security weakness in applications, network architecture or OS), high-impact threats (due to global outbreaks), content and process-based threats and distributed threats.

The Labs is expecting the second half of this year to be no better than the first.