Security Threats are Genetically Modified.Never-Seen-Before Malware Complexity

According to the latest research made by McAfee, the security software provider, the cyber espionage danger is continuously increasing, threatening the national security.
The cybercrime economy is growing while the threats become more advanced and are targeting personal information, online services and even social networking applications.
2008 will be the apogee for the international cyber spying and for the sophisticated malware market, and McAfee’s Virtual Criminology Report and the information gathered by FBI, NATO, SOCA and experts from leading groups and universities, show the following results:

Many governments and the allied groups use the Internet for cyber spying and cyber attacks, targeting critical national infrastructure network systems like financial markets, air traffic control, electricity, and government computer networks.
The Web espionage operations grew in 120 countries that use the Internet for that.


Surprisingly, China is the origin of lots of cyber attacks and the government declared that it is monitoring the cyber espionage.
What in the near past started as simple curiosity now has become very well-organized operations for military, political, economic and technical espionage.


About the danger posed to personal information in online services, the problem seems extremely critical.
The most advanced threats have been genetically modified and now there is a new level of complexity in malware, which has never seen before.
These type of threats are now more resilient, modified over and over again like recombinant DNA, and consist of highly sophisticated functionality such as encryption draw. Nuwar aka the Storm Worm that unfortunately was just the first example, in 2008 there will be more to come.



One of the latest targets of cyber criminals is the VoIP software and records showed that there were many vishing and phreaking.
Vishing is the phishing via the VoIP and phreaking means hacking into telephone networks to make long distance phone calls.


The P2P software was the number 1 channel that facilitated the data breaches in Japan.


It is cheaper now, to rent a spamming platform so the criminals have access to custom-written Trojans built to steal credit card data.


To check for additional details please see the McAfee Virtual Criminology Report 2007.