December 31, 2009

Adobe Reader and Flash will surpass Microsoft Office applications as favorite targets of cybercriminals, a security vendor predicted Tuesday.

In unveiling its 2010 Threat Predictions report, McAfee said the growing popularity of the Adobe products has attracted the attention of cybercriminals, who have been increasingly targeting the applications. Adobe Reader and Flash are two of the most widely deployed applications in the world.

Find out how to increase availability while reducing data center energy consumption As a result of Adobe's success in client software, McAfee Labs believes "Adobe product exploitation will likely surpass that of Microsoft Office applications in 2010."

Security experts for quite a while have warned of the potential security risk posed by Flash. In November, Foreground Security identified a flaw in the way Web browsers handle Flash files that could be used to compromise Web sites that have users submit content. Beyond Adobe, cybercriminals are also expected to step up efforts next year to crack social networking sites, as well as third-party applications in general. Internet users can expect crooks to use more complex Trojans and botnets to build and execute attacks and to take advantage of HTML 5 to create threats. HTML 5 is the next major revision of hypertext markup language, the core markup language of the Web.

"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," Jeff Green, senior VP of McAfee labs, said in a statement. Facebook, Twitter, and the third-party applications that incorporate the social networks have given criminals new technologies to target and exploit. In 2010, users will be most vulnerable to "rogue apps" distributed by criminals across the networks and to crooks that use the names of people on friends lists to get victims to click on unfamiliar links they might otherwise avoid, McAfee said. In addition, the use of abbreviated URLs on sites like Twitter will make it easier for cybercriminals to mask and direct users to malicious Web sites.

Source:-http://www.informationweek.com