Hackers On The Rise

Mobile Worms that buy malware from app stores. There has already been malware that has made it into the Android Play Store and even Apple's App Store. Given that the large majority of mobile devices run without any type of malware detection, it is inevitable that we are prone for a major, disruptive malware possibly posing as an update for a popular application.

 A significant deviation in communication patterns may reflect malware spread. If these devices are participating inside the corporate network, this could prove to be very disruptive, not only due to the increase in network activity but malware moving from mobile to standard operating systems.

 The popular Android mobile operating system, with its open ecosystem, may prove an especially attractive target to cyber criminals. Trend Micro predicts that the number of malicious and high-risk Android apps will increase three-fold from about 350,000 in 2012 to more than 1 million in 2013, broadly in line with the predicted growth of the OS itself.

 Malicious and high-risk Android apps are becoming more sophisticated. An "arms race" between Android attackers and security providers is likely to occur in the coming year. One particular area of concern is malware that buys apps from an app store without user permission. McAfee points to the Android/Market pay. A Trojan, which already exists, and predicts we'll see criminals add it as a payload to a mobile worm in 2013.

 Buying apps developed by malware authors puts money in their pockets. A mobile worm that uses exploits to propagate over numerous vulnerable phones is the perfect platform for malware that buys such apps; attackers will no longer need victims to install a piece of malware.

Ransomware - in which criminals hijack a user's capability to access data, communicate or use the system at all and then forces the user to pay a ransom to regain access. Ransomware on Windows PCs has more than tripled during the past year. Both Android and Apple's OS X as targets of ransomware in 2013 as ransomware kits, similar to the malware kits currently available in the underground market. Attackers have already developed ransomware for mobile devices.

Attackers targeting Windows of all varieties will expand their use of sophisticated and devastating below-the-kernel attacks. The evolution of computer security software and other defenses on client endpoints is driving threats into different areas of the operating system stack, especially for covert and persistent attackers. Some of the critical assets targeted include the BIOS, master boot record (MBR), volume boot record (VBR), GUID Partition Table (GPT) and NTLoader. HTML5 increases the attack surface for every user, as its features do not require extensive policy or access controls.

In 2013, destructive attacks (cybersabotage and cyberweaponry) on utilities and critical infrastructure systems. Destructive payloads in malware have become rare because attackers prefer to take control of their victims' computers for financial gain or to steal intellectual property. Expect this malicious behavior to grow in 2013. this is hacktivism taken to a new level. As with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, the technical bar for the hackers to hurdle is rather low. Attackers can install destructive malware on a large number of machines