2010 security landscape: data privacy, botnets, ‘hack-tivism’ and the war on cyberterror

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) December 15, 2010 -- 2010 was the year that the crackdown on data privacy and security breaches got serious, according to managed security company, Redscan. High-profile issues from the investigation into the 2008 Pentagon hack to Facebook scuffles over privacy issues, combined with the very real threat of punitive measures from the Information Commissioner’s Office, have put data security firmly at the heart of 2011 security strategies.

2010 has been cited by many as the year of the botnet, and certainly the vast majority of spam and malware came from botnets and compromised hosts during 2010 - a trend that started as far back as late 2008. Co-operation between governments to fight cybercrime - something called for by Redscan’s Simon Heron in 2009 - had a boost in March 2010, with the investigation that led to the shutdown of the Mariposa botnet (and the arrest of its perpetrators), the result of co-operation between the Spanish and US governments. In October 2010 the UK government announced what amounts to its own ‘war on cyberterror’, with the announcement of a £500 million fund for a national cyber security programme over the next four years. High profile cyber-attacks have included the Royal Navy and Google.

The rise of the ‘hack-tivist’ and the role of the voluntary botnet has been thrown into sharp relief in the wake of the arrest of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, with reported attacks attempted by Wikileaks supporters on sites including the Swedish Prosecution Authority, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Amazon, using as part of the attack a botnet made up of volunteers supporting the cause. While it appears that the majority of the attacks are coming from established botnets it is significant that people are willing to volunteer their computers to take part.

“User behaviour has completely changed the security landscape,” says Simon Heron, Redscan’s Internet Security Analyst. “Socialisation of the internet means that groups of people can create co-ordinate cyber-attacks against individuals or organisations. At a business user level, this socialisation means that employees are using social tools to download applications, pass information between networks of contacts and access internet-based services.”

“As recently as 2009 businesses were debating whether to allow their employees access to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube,” Heron continues. “This year, the two biggest users of corporate bandwidth were YouTube and Facebook. The way we do things has fundamentally changed, and IT strategies are having to work hard to keep up.”

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For more information on security issues, see Redscan’s website, visit Simon Heron’s blog, or follow him on Twitter.

About Redscan

Redscan Ltd provides a modular managed security solution, tailored to suit individual company requirements, can be delivered either on premises through Customer Premises Equipment (CPE)) or in the cloud. All security updates are included in the managed service.

For more information on this and other security issues, see www.redscan.com, visit the blog at http://blog.redscan.com, or follow Redscan on Twitter @Redscan_ltd.

2010     botnets     cyberterror     Redscan.