The Biggest Cyber security Threats of 2013 by Forbes Magazine

Threat #1: Social Engineering

This begins with focusing on a tried-and-true blackhat tactic in both the physical and digital worlds. Now social engineering has moved onto social networks, including Facebook and LinkedIn. Attackers are increasing their use of social engineering, which goes beyond calling targeted employees and trying to trick them into giving up information.


Threat #2: APTs

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are highly sophisticated and carefully constructed. It can be the precursor for a sophisticated attack meant to breach the wall of an organization. They are targeting both corporations and governments. The intention behind APT attacks is to gain access to a network and steal information quietly.


Threat #3: Internal Threats

Some of the most dangerous attacks come from the inside. These attacks can be the most devastating, due to the amount of damage a privileged user can do and the data they can access.


Threat #4: BYOD

The issue of trust comes into play in the mobile world as well, with many businesses struggling to come up with the right mix of technologies and policies to hop aboard the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend. Users are increasingly using their devices as they would their PCs, and by doing so are opening themselves up to web-based attacks the same as they would if they were operating a desktop computer. All this means that the flood of iPhones, Google Android phones and other devices making their way into the workplace are opening up another potential gateway for attackers that needs to be secured.


Threat #5: Cloud Security

With more companies putting more information in public cloud services, those services become juicy targets, and can represent a single point of failure for the enterprise. For businesses, this means that security must continue to be an important part of the conversation they have with cloud providers, and the needs of the business should be made clear.


Threat #6: HTML5

Just as the adoption of cloud computing has changed the vulnerability surface, so will the adoption of HTML5. HTML5′s cross-platform support and integration of various technologies opens up new possibilities for attack, such as abusing Web Worker functionality.


Threat #7: Botnets

But even though the arms race between researchers and attackers favors innovation, expect cybercriminals to spend a lot of time perfecting what they know best, such as making sure their botnets have high availability and are distributed. While the legal takedowns being launched by companies such as Microsoft succeeded in temporarily disrupting spam and malware operations, it is naïve to assume attackers aren’t taking what they have learned from those takedowns and using it to shore up their operations. Botnets are here to stay.



Threat #8: Precision Targeted Malware

Attackers are also learning from the steps researchers are taking to analyze their malware, and techniques were recently demonstrated that can help render analysis ineffective by designing malware that will fail to execute correctly on any environment other than the one originally targeted.


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