Watchout: 5 security trends for 2013

1. Data Breach - A Common man's agony

We live in a world absolutely saturated with information, so it is hardly surprising that breaches continue to happen in a widely diverse group of organizations scattered over various sectors and across geographies.

The 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report published by the Verizon RISK Team disclosed that there were 855 data breach incidents and 174 million compromised records that occurred in 2011.

In the coming year, IT professionals will have to manage not just threats of data leakage and identity theft, but also growing consumer and employee concerns about data privacy.

2. Cyber-crime - Cyber Espionage will rise!

Considering 2012 a year of cyber espinoge as reports of cyber theft and crime were reported across verticals and industries; this will further infilterate to more and more indutries in coming year.

Avinash Kadam, ISACA India Task Force Member, says, "With the growing number of cyber threats, it is critical for enterprises to safeguard their information assets. Addressing cyber issues should be considered beyond defining internet policies. It is equally important for enterprises to educate their employees on information risks, as it is not just an IT issue, but also a business issue.

3. Mobile Malwares are here to stay!

Mobility is way ahead and so are mobile malwares. FortiGuard Labs researchers currently monitor approximately 50,000 mobile malware samples, as opposed to the millions they are monitoring for the PC.

The researchers have already observed a significant increase in mobile malware volume and believe that this skewing is about to change even more dramatically starting next year.

Also, in 2012, FortiGuard Labs analyzed mobile botnets such as Zitmo and found they have many of the same features and functionality of traditional PC botnets. In 2013, the team predicts that thanks to this feature parity between platforms, new forms of Direct Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that will leverage both PC and mobile devices simultaneously.

Malware for mobile phones was marked a main trend of 2012 in last year's ESET report. This time researchers focused on malware for Android OS as the market share of Android mobile phones have been increasing dramatically.

Not only an exponential growth of mobile malware but the fact that malware is becoming more complex thus expanding the range of malicious actions they perform on an infected device makes it the main concern for security community in 2013.

4. Holistic Security Approach - Work in progress

One trend that's impossible to deny is that these security problems may start in discreetly different realms, but the nature of the internet is making them more intertwined than ever before. So, a holistic approach to counter security concerns will the road ahead.

"With various platforms and various directions from which secuirty is at threat for any enterprise; the centeralised control of the platforms is a must," informs Sundar Ram, VP, technology sales consulting, Oracle Corporation Asia Pacific.

5. Not your Desktop but your browser under threat

It's your browser - not your system - that malware is after. It's actually the browser that malware attacks and not the system you are accessing that browser from.

According to Watchguard's security trends, traditional malware tends to infect the OS - typically, as an executable program that modifies various boot parameters so it runs every time the computer is turned on. Now, a new type of malware has emerged.

Sometimes called a Man-in-the-Browser (MitB) or browser zombie, it arrives as a malicious browser extension, plugin, helper object, or piece of JavaScript. It doesn't infect the whole system; instead it takes complete control of your browser and runs whenever you surf the web.

And why not? With our increased adoption of cloud services and online banking, a great deal of personal and sensitive data passes through our web browsers. Many anti-virus solutions are focused on catching traditional malware and aren't as effective at detecting these browser based infections. As a result, we expect to see a steep rise in browser-infecting malware in 2013.