Bad malware storms brewing
ADTMAG.com has an interesting article talking of the convergance of spyware and more sophisticated phishing attacks. They talk about the convergance of viruses and spam engines that happened in 2003 as a real shift in the dynamic of WHERE junk mail was coming from. Today botnets account for about 90% of the spam online, and of course, the botnets are the zombie armies that can be (and are being) utilized to bully web pages off the net, or extort large amounts of $$ due to denial of service attacks.
Essentially, the crux of this article though is that the spyware writers are finding that they can get a LOT more information from end users pcs than they’re making use of. They suggest a scenario that could happen where an infected pc whose user has an ebay account and just lost out on an auction could be sent a seemingly legit email explaining that the high bidder backed out and that they are now the winner of the auction, please remit payment to…..
In essense what this means is that we can expect MUCH more targeted and customized phishing attacks, which seems to make sense. Most phishing attacks today are shotgun approaches and may net a number of accounts (sometimes hundreds of accounts.) As that becomes harder to do, I imagine they would start to target smaller groups more specifically (hoping for a higher success rate.) Unfortunately spyware has evolved VERY quickly and is at times installed intentionally for the “neat game” or screensaver or who knows what that the company offers.