Future of Malware

This week Network World takes a look at the future of malware in a slideshow format. For those of us that battle it on a daily basis, it's always good to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, and try to see where the evolution points are, and maybe, just maybe get a step ahead.

Each slide covers a different aspect of malware, presented with a viewpoint from different vendors. We've heard the term APT already, Advanced Persistent Threat, and it seems these attacks are getting more advanced if not more persistent. Slide 4 from the presentation talks about an attack where the wives of executives were targeted for a socially engineered malware attack. The idea being they would be less tech savvy and have a less secure PC at home, and offer up a way to target the executives.

While mobile is continuing to be a concern, there was also an interesting slide that seemed to indicate that while mobile platforms like iPhone and Android may be interesting targets, it's more likely hackers are going to go for platform agnostic malware that would affect the commonality between these smartphone platforms and regular PC platforms, like HTML and Javascript.

Without any doubt, malware is in our future, and we need to keep vigilant with up to date security software, web proxies and secure web gateways.