Open Source Or Proprietary? Discriminating Thieves Choose Open Source
McAfee's semi-annual overview of their on-going security research says that cyber-criminals are becoming more sophisticated, and are banding together in loose associations to swap code and deliver support for their nefarious endeavors. They've got their eye on your smartphone, too.
Among the specific trends outlined in the report are expectations for the continued growth of botnets with the cooperation among hackers adding to the problem via group efforts to develop and refine threat code in the same manner that open-source contributors work in a community. The vast majority of botnets will continue to target flaws in Microsoft products and propagate themselves through buffer overflows, according to the report.
McAfee expects that 2007 will also be the year when attackers truly begin aiming their work at smart phones, the more PC-like handheld devices finding their way into the hands of an increasing number of enterprise users.
