(MSPAlliance) - Monday, April 24, 2006 - Last year saw a significant rise in Internet data breaches for profit, partially through spy and spear phishing. Spy phishing is the act of a stealing a user's data or credit card information by creating a replica of a legitimate Web site through techniques including spoofed domains and embedded fraudulent URLs. Spear phishing is targeted at specific individuals, usually through an e-mail spammed through someone on the recipient's contact list.
Aside from increase in breaches through phishing, another growing IT concern is the zombie network, created through botnets with functions including rootkits. A bot is a bad virus that a hacker triggers remotely, allowing the thief to partake in a variety of illegal activities, including spam, keylogging, information theft, automatic propagation and denial of service. A botnet, short for "bot network," is an army of bots, and a zombie is a bot-infected computer.
About 10,000 zombies join hacker-controlled botnets every day, and more botnets are becoming driven through instant-messaging systems. Botnets contributed to 33 percent of spam last year, while 65 percent of threats included spyware, adware and rootkitting.
Education and awareness are the best way to confront cyber threats, but a company's short-term strategy should focus on direct intervention. Companies need to block threats before they reach the system end-point and wreak havoc on IT security.
