Threat Landscape in 2011

OK, so it's that time of the year again and all the security folks are out making predictions. And, as usual, I have a number of inbound calls for me to pump out the same. Not necessarily "the same" predictions though - since why would marketing and PR teams want to pimp "the same" predictions as everyone else... that'll never get mentioned in the press... ideally a few predictions about how the world will come to an end and preferably in a way that no one has though of before. You know the sort of prediction I mean - "By the end of 2011, cyber criminals will have full control of the electronic systems that control sewer pipes in the US and will be extorting cities for millions of dollars - or else they flood the city and cause massive deaths from typhoid and plague."

Cynicism in the run up to Christmas? Bah-humbug :-)

Anyway, despite all that, "predictions" can be pretty useful - but only if they're (mostly) correct and can be actionable. So, with that in mind, I've posted some "expectations" (rather than predictions) for 2011. I think it's important to understand the trends behind certain predictions. A prediction that comes from no where, with no context, and with no qualification is about as helpful as a TSA officer.

Here are the 2011 predictions (aka expectations) I posted on the Damballa blog:

1. The cyber-crime ecosystem will continue to add new specialist niches that straddle the traditional black and white markets for both the tools they produce and information they harvest. The resulting gray-markets will broaden the laundering services they already offer for identities and reputation.
2. Commercial developers of malware will continue to diversify their business models and there will be a steady increase in the number of authors that transition from “just building” the malware construction kits to running and operating their own commercial botnet services.
3. The production of “proof-of-concept” malware, hitherto limited to boutique penetration testing companies, will become more mainstream as businesses that produce mechanical and industrial goods find a greater need to account for threats that target their physical products or production facilities.
4. 4. Reputation will be an increasingly important factor in why an organization (or the resources of that organization) will be targeted for exploitation. As IP and DNS reputation systems mature and are more widely adopted, organized cyber-criminals will be more cognizant of the reputation of the systems they compromise and seek to leverage that reputation in their evasion strategies.
5. The pace at which botnet operators update and reissue the malware agents on their victims’ computers will continue to increase. In an effort to avoid dynamic analysis and detection technologies deployed at the perimeter of enterprise networks or operating within the clouds of anti-virus service providers, criminal operators will find themselves rolling out new updates every few hours (which isn’t a problem for them).
6. Malware authors will continue to tinker with new methods of botnet control that abuse commercial web services such as social networks sites, micro-blogging sites, free file hosting services and paste bins – but will find them increasingly ineffective as a reliable method of command and control as the pace in which takedown operations by security vendors increases.
7. The requirement for malware to operate for longer periods of time in a stealthy manner upon the victim’s computer will become ever more important for cyber-criminals. As such, more flexible command and control discovery techniques – such as dynamic domain generation algorithms – will become more popular in an effort to thwart blacklisting technologies. As the criminals mature their information laundering processes, the advantage of long-term host compromises will be evident in their monetary gains.
8. The rapidity in which compromised systems are bought, sold and traded amongst cyber-criminals will increase. As more criminals conduct their business within the federated ecosystem, there will be more opportunity for exchanging access to victim computers and greater degrees of specialization.
9. Botnet operators who employ web-based command and control portals will enhance their security of both the portal application and the data stolen from their botnet victims. Encryption of the data uploaded to the data drop sites will increase and utilize asymmetric cryptography in order to evade security researchers who reverse engineer the malware samples.
10. The requirement for “live” and dynamic control of victims will increase as botnet operators hone new ways of automatically controlling or scripting repeated fraud actions. Older botnets will continue their batch-oriented commands for noisy attacks, but the malware agents and their command and control systems will grow more flexible even if they aren’t used.