Future of securuty

There’s nothing better than adding a good bit of jargon and a catchy acronym to define a market trend in a way people can understand. Finjan, an up and coming leader in secure Web gateway products, recently did just that by highlighting the increasing growth in criminals using online cybercrime services rather than going to the trouble of developing their own crimeware operations. Far easier to just buy the malware off the shelf, subscribe to a service or simply buy or lease the results.

Finjan is calling it Crimeware-as-a-Service and describes a number of CaaS activities increasingly making their presence felt. “Cyber-criminals and criminal organisations are getting better at protecting themselves from law enforcement by using the Crimeware services, especially since the operator does not necessarily conduct the criminal activities related to the data that is being compromised but only provides the infrastructure for it,” explains Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CTO of Finjan.

Graham Titterington, Principal Analyst at Ovum, specialises in IT security and business continuity. He highlights criminalisation of cyber attacks as the number one security issue faced by the industry today. “This is the big one,” he says.

It’s not news that crimeware creators are making toolkits for their growing customer base, but their level of sophistication continues to grow and they now offer services such as sophisticated, anti-forensic attack techniques and the ability to manage and monitor malicious code affiliation networks all backed with comprehensive update mechanisms.

The introduction of malware for profit has irrevocably changed the threat landscape for organisations and individuals alike and generally, we’re ill prepared for them. Patrik Bihammar, a senior analyst for IDC’s software practice, has a focus on the security and system management markets in Australia and New Zealand. Bihammar told CRN the big changes facing local companies are similar to those abroad. Traditional security solutions, he explained are not prepared for the latest Web-borne threats the industry is now facing.