27/05/2016
1. Hacks of mobile payments and other non-traditional payment systems. As smartphones continues to become the preferred source of authentication for many financial transactions, malware authors will increase their efforts to steal funds from consumers' Apple Pay, Google Wallet and other mobile payment systems.
CIOs listen up: once attackers have learned to infiltrate consumer’s mobile wallet they may tap into your corporate networks for those smartphone owner’s work. "Emails, contacts, authentication measures and apps that access the corporate network from the phone can become a phenomenal source of intellectual property, insider information and other confidential business materials become easily obtainable and can net an attacker sizable treasure."
CIO May 2016 digital magazine cover
Download the May digital magazine
Cover story: How analytics transforms IoT data into business intelligence
READ NOW
2. From Heartbleed to heartache. Open source vulnerabilities, including Heartbleed, Shellshock and Poodle, struck fear into the hearts of Akamai and other companies in 2015. Expect more attacks on the creaky Internet infrastructure. Leonard notes that a significant number of the Alexa 1000 top websites are not up-to-date on certificates. "We observed certificate issues related to older hashing schemes such as SHA-1, as well as problems related to the version of ciphers supported. If some of the “big names” on the Internet are struggling to keep up, how can smaller vendors cope?"
Additional problems include old and broken Javascript versions; end-of-life challenges for core software such as Windows XP; and new applications built on recycled code with old vulnerabilities. "It's very difficult for systems to be migrated because you risk losing functionality or introducing new bugs."
3. New top level domains pose phishing pitfalls. Emerging general TLDs, which number more than 800 and may expand another 1,300 in the next few years, will be used in active spam and other malicious campaigns. Leonard says criminals and nation-state attackers will lure, via social media, email and other tools, unsuspecting users toward malware and data theft. For example, criminals could steer unsuspecting consumers towards shop.apple, apple.macintosh or apple.computer to try to steal their information. In a Raytheon Websense sample set of several TLDs, millions of different URLs hosted malicious content. "These TLDs will also make it significantly harder for defenders to protect, as many are unprepared for the new landscape."