Enisa, the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security, has presented its list of top cyberthreats, as a first “taste” of its interim Threat Landscape 2013 report.
The study analyses 50 reports and identifies an increase in threats to: infrastructure through targeted attacks; mobile devices; and social media identity thefts carried out by cybercriminals over Cloud services.
As already reported by Enisa in its report on major cyberattacks last July, cyberattack is the sixth most important cause of outages in telecommunication infrastructures, and it impacts upon a considerable number of users. Taking into account these incidents, and denial of service threat developments, Enisa observes an increase in infrastructure threats in 2013.
Cybercriminals increasingly use advanced methods to implement attack techniques (vectors) that are non-traceable and difficult to take down. Anonymisation technologies and peer-to-peer systems (so-called distributed technologies) play an important role in this. It is clear that mobile technology is increasingly exploited by cybercriminals. Threats of all kinds that were encountered in the more traditional arena of IT will affect mobile devices and the services available on these platforms.
Enisa warned that the spread of mobile devices leads to an amplification of abuse based on knowledge/attack methods targeting social media.
The availability of malware and cyber-hacking tools and services, together with digital currencies (e.g. Bitcoins) and anonymous payment services is opening up new avenues for cyberfraud and criminal activity.
There is a real possibility of large impact events when attacks combining various threats are successfully launched.
Since 2012, browser-based attacks still remain the most reported threats, and Java remains the most exploited software for this kind of threat. Attacks against content management systems of websites are also popular. Other threats include botnets, denial of services, rogueware/scareware, targeted attack, identity theft and search engine poisoning.
A full Enisa Threat Landscape 2013 report is due by the end of the year.
www.enisa.europa.eu