With more and more people conducting transactions and spending ever increasing amounts of time on the computer, hackers are increasingly targeting software and other computer services as a way to steal information and other nefarious tasks. The security community is working as hard as hacker groups to prevent attacks from compromising the computers of users around the globe.
Security firm McAfee has announced its 2010 Threat Predictions report. According to the report, in 2010 Adobe will surpass Microsoft as a target for hackers. Hackers traditionally target Microsoft software products like Office more heavily than applications and software from other vendors.
McAfee figures that the popularity of Adobe products like Flash and Reader, two of the most distributed applications in the world, will lead hackers to target Adobe applications more in 2010. McAfee reports, “Adobe product exploitation will likely surpass that of Microsoft Office applications in 2010.”
Hackers will also step up attacks on social networking sites in 2010 believes McAfee as well as stepping up attacks on third party applications in general. Hackers are expected to take advantage of HTML 5 to create Trojans and botnets that are cross browser capable.
McAfee’s Jeff Green said, “We’re now facing emerging threats from the explosive growth of social networking sites, the exploitation of popular applications, and more advanced techniques used by cybercriminals, but we’re confident that 2010 will be a successful year for the cybersecurity community.”
Most attacks on social networking sites are expected to come in the form of rogue apps that are distributed across the network and use the names on a users friends list to trick them into clicking links they might not click otherwise. McAfee believes that cyber criminals will also begin using botnets that adopt a per-to-peer control scheme that are more distributed and resilient to techniques used against today’s botnets by security firms.
Adobe software has already been targeted by hackers this year. In February a flaw in Adobe Flash was exploited allowing ads on eWeek to infect the computer of users.
