McAfee Labs has released its annual predictionsreport for 2014.
The report analyses 2013 trends through its proprietary McAfee Global Threat Intelligence (GTI) service to forecast the threat landscape for this year.
In 2014, McAfee Labs expects to see mobile platforms attract the lion's share of threat innovation. Ransomware is expected to proliferate on mobile devices, as virtual currencies such as Bitcoin fuel the growth of ransomware across all platforms.
The report states that attacks using advanced evasion techniques will come of age, with enhanced capabilities to identify and bypass some sandboxing and other local security measures. Social platforms will be used more aggressively to target the finances and personal information of consumers, as well as the intellectual property and trade secrets of business leaders.
"With target audiences so large, financing mechanisms so convenient, and cyber talent so accessible, robust innovation in criminal technology and tactics will continue its surge forward in 2014," says Vincent Weafer, senior VP of McAfee Labs. "The activity in mobile and social is representative of an increasing 'black hat' focus on the fastest-growing and most digitally active consumer audiences, in which personal information is almost as attractive as banking passwords."
He adds that the emergence and evolution of advanced evasion techniques represent a new enterprise security battlefront, where the hacker's deep knowledge of architectures and common security tactics enable attacks that are difficult to uncover.
McAfee Labs foresees mobile malware being the driver of growth in both technical innovation and the volume of attacks in the overall malware "market" in 2014. With businesses and consumers continuing their shift to mobile, ransomware aimed at mobile devices, attacks targeting near-field communications vulnerabilities, and attacks that corrupt valid apps to expropriate data without being detected, will increase.
According to the report, virtual currencies will fuel malicious ransomware attacks around the world, as they provide cyber criminals with the unregulated and anonymous payment infrastructure they need to collect money from their victims. Currencies such as Bitcoin will enable and accelerate new generations of ransomware, such as the Cryptolocker threat of 2013.
Furthermore, cyber-criminal gangs and state actors will deploy new stealth attacks that will be harder to identify and stop. There will be broad adoption of advanced evasion techniques, such as the use of sandbox-aware attacks that do not fully deploy unless they believe they are running directly on an unprotected device.
McAfee Labs also states that attacks that leverage social platform features to capture passwords or data about user contacts, location or business activities will be more prevalent, with information being used to target advertising or perpetrate virtual or real-world crimes.
The company also predicts that PC attacks will exploit application vulnerabilities in HTML5, which allows Web sites to come alive with interaction, personalisation and rich capabilities for programmers.
On the mobile platform, it's predicted that attacks will breach the browser's "sandbox" and give attackers direct access to the device and its services.
The report concludes that, because they lack sufficient leverage to demand security measures in line with their organisational needs, small businesses that purchase cloud-based services will continue to grapple with security risks unaddressed by cloud providers' user agreements and operating procedures.
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