It's that time of the year again. The office slows down for a couple of weeks, and we think back at the good, bad, and ugly events that took place over the past year. This has certainly been a year that will be remembered by historians for the election of Barack Obama as President, the bailout of Wall Street and job losses for many industries - including technology companies and state and local governments.
But in the field of computer security, what will we remember about 2008? There are plenty of opinions available to us. From the Georgian cyberwar to Chinese cyberattacks to analysis regarding the effectiveness (or not) of the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standard, CIO Magazine offered their "Security Headlines from 2008: The Year in Review."
After over a year of work, the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency just issued their report earlier this month which outlines their views on what is currently good and bad in the nation regarding Internet security - as well as recommendation for the 2009 and beyond.
Other security magazines and organizations offer their own lists, but I want to take a stab at what I think was the biggest security trend for this past year. No doubt that the Cyber Coup in San Fran and Georgian cyber war were big stories, but I think 2008 will (unfortunately) be remembered as the year that (bad guy) hackers became even more professional and increased their advantage over network defenders. In reality, the numbers are pretty scary.
The Privacy Rights Clearing House keeps track of reported breaches, and we have almost reached 250 million in the USA since 2005. The reported numbers grow every year, largely do to legal requirements to report potential breaches to consumers. No doubt, many of these records are lost or inadvertantly placed online by staff who should know better or make mistakes.
And yet, numerous reports in 2008 showed that the total number of infections, botnets and the spread of malware is increasing rapidly. Here's an excerpt from the Kaspersky Security Bulletin :
The first six months of 2008 confirmed the predictions we made at the end of last year about the evolution of malicious programs, namely:
- the continuing evolution of so-called Malware 2.0 technologies
- the evolution of rootkits
- the return of file viruses
- attacks on social networking sites
- threats for mobile devices
One of the most notable malicious programs during the first half of 2008 was, undoubtedly, the Storm worm (classified by Kaspersky Lab as Zhelatin). It remains in the vanguard of Malware 2.
Bottom line: we have a lot of work to do in 2009 and beyond. Defending government networks is becoming even more complex and difficult. I will talk about 2009 predictions in my next piece, but one area of growth is the outsourcing of security functions to companies that are able to keep up with the well-funded bad guys.
What are your thoughts on 2008? Are we better or worse off (as a nation or in your situation) than this time last year?
Leave a comment