the F-Secure Corporation has a rather nice look back at the Security Summary for 2004: The year of phishing, professional virus-writing, and arrests.
They look back at 2004 and call it a mixed bag. The beginning of the year was record-breaking busy with a huge number of major new virus outbreaks. However, since June, things calmed down and we’ve only had a few serious outbreaks since. New trends in 2004 were primarily the massive increase in phishing email scams, introduction of open-source botnets – networks of infected machines harnessed for malicious operations, and for-profit virus-writing, but this year was also the best year ever in actually catching virus writers and other cyber criminals.
This quote caught my eye:
“Current email systems are in serious trouble. I’m afraid we need to do a major overhaul of the underlying email standards in the near future. This would mean changing the basic protocols to more robust ones and adding strong user authentication. This would be a massive and very expensive project…which means it won’t be done until the current email systems simply stop working“
Recent Comments