According to the ‘global threat report’, Spear phishing (email spoofing) is going to stay popular this year. The next type would be what is described as ‘watering hole’ attacks that target website with malware so they can attack visitors of the site. It is reported that several companies succumbed to this type of attack in 2013 because of the expertise of hackers who are constantly improvising on this.
‘Watering hole’ attacks are considered more sophisticated because they cannot be detected by email filtering security techniques and overall are difficult to detect. Other types of attacks are likely to be via social media, increasing use of sandbox-aware malware, which is designed to counter the use of virtual machines (VMs) to detect and neutralize malware.
A serious claim also refers to malware that can be used on operating systems such as during the Windows XP end-of-life time when those machines will no longer get the security patches and updates. So, hackers may be waiting to attack such machines coming up around April of 2014. It would behoove retailers to pay attention to these growing attacks, become more educated and proactive in the actions they take to counter them.
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