Trend Micro reports confirm arrival of the 'post-PC threat era'
With the release of its 2012 "Annual Roundup and Mobile Security" reports, Trend Micro (www.trendmicro.com) documents how cybercriminals have moved beyond the PC, targeting Android, social media and even the Mac OS X with new attacks.
"2012 Annual Security Roundup - Evolved Threats in a Post-PC World
Trend Micro's Annual Security Roundup' shows that most of Trend Micro's predictions for 2012 came true, and the company encapsulated 2012 as the year where threats launched the beginning of the "Post-PC" Era. Threats have now escalated past the desktop environment.
2012 ended with 350,000 threats for Android as detected by Trend Micro. Malware growth reached 14-3 for Android versus PC, and it only took Android three years to achieve the PC volume of malware threats achieved within fourteen years.
2012 is also the year that Java supplanted pure Windows-based threats in the attackers' cross-hairs leading, among other things, to the first widespread attack against the Mac.
English and Russian lead among the Top 10 Spam languages while India leads among the Top 10 spam-sending countries.
Social media platforms continued to grow as areas of concern with attackers targeting them more, users putting themselves at risk by oversharing on them, and their legitimate services being co-opted to support cybercriminal activities.
Enterprises and organizations suffered from data breaches and targeted attacks at an alarming rate. In one incident alone, the Global Payments data breach, costs have already reached US$94 million and are still climbing. Targeted attacks are being helped along by the "children of STUXNET": attack code and kits like Flame, Duqu and Gauss that are derived from the STUXNET attack three years ago.
2012 was also the year of APTs such as Luckycat, Taidoor, IXESHE. (9)
Attackers adopted more professional software development practices rather than introducing new attacks. The Blackhole Exploit Kit (BHEK), Automatic Transfer Systems (ATSs) and Ransomware were all refined and improved with new features in ways that would make any commercial software vendor proud, according to Trend Micro.
