SANS Flags Browsers, Botnets as Top Security 'Menaces'

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SANS Flags Browsers, Botnets as Top Security 'Menaces'

1/17/2008

By David Nagel

Research and education organization the SANS Institute this week revealed its list of the top menaces facing IT in the coming year. Echoing earlier reports from security watchdog organizations, the group's "Top-10 Cyber Security Menaces for 2008" cited Web 2.0 technologies, converged devices, botnets, and browser addons among the worst, with a heavy emphasis on consumerized technologies and the vulnerabilities they present.

Consumer Technologies
These "consumerized" technologies include a wide range of Web applications, online media, and consumer devices (like the iPhone) designed to take advantage of them. They're the sorts of technologies over which IT has very little control, as students, faculty, and staff bring their personal electronics to campus and otherwise insinuate themselves in the enterprise.

Top-10 Security Menaces of '08

1. Browser Exploits
2. Botnets
3. Espionage via Targeted Phishing
4. Mobile Devices and VoIP
5. Insider Attacks
6. Identity Theft via Persistent Bots
7. Increasingly Malicious Spyware
8. Web 2.0/Web Application Exploits
9. Blended Approaches to Phishing
10. Infected Consumer Devices

Source: The SANS Institute, January 2008

At the tops of the SANS Institute's list comes one of these technologies: digital media and other related technologies that users access through browser addons: Flash, QuickTime, etc.

Said the report, "Web site attacks on browsers are increasingly targeting components, such as Flash and QuickTime, that are not automatically patched when the browser is patched. At the same time, Web site attacks have migrated from simple ones based on one or two exploits posted on a Web site, to more sophisticated attacks based on scripts that cycle through multiple exploits, to even more sophisticated attacks that increasingly utilize packaged modules that can effectively disguise their payloads."

Converged consumer communications devices, like the iPhone and other types of smart phones, coming at at No. 4. Other types of consumer electronics, such as USB thumb drives, GPS systems, and others, come in at No. 10 on the list.

And, like other recent reports, SANS also names Web 2.0 and other types of Web applications as major culprits.

Back in October, Georgia Tech's Information Security Center released a report entitled "GTISC Emerging Cyber Threats Report for 2008," in which Web 2.0 was cited first as one of the threats to watch in 2008. And earlier this month, the UK's KPMG released a report for the business sector called "Risk concerns stall uptake of Web 2.0 technology in the workplace," in which more than half of the executives surveyed for the report cited security fears as major barriers to institutional adoption of Web 2.0 technologies.