Cisco security report looks @ nextgen workforce

*As Spam declines

The latest Cisco Annual Security Report has for the first time taken a look at the next generation workforce.

This is coming as mass spam was reported to be on the decline trend in the year just ended, 2011, especially from 379 billion messages daily to about 124 billion messages daily as at November 2011.

A highlight of the global security report for ICT users made available to ITRealms Online by the global public relations manager at Cisco, Ms. Rose Bambi indicated that after the 2010 cybercrime turning point, when spam levels started to decline for the first time, this trend continued throughout 2011.

The report analysts noted that this is a trend that could be explained mainly by several key botnet takedowns throughout the last two years.

She quoted the vice president and chief security officer for Cisco, Mr. John N. Stewart, as saying that however, the number of vulnerabilities increased.

“There are fewer widespread attacks but greater numbers of smaller, more focused attacks,” he said, stressing that these are some of the key findings of the latest Cisco Annual Security Report.

Noting that for the first time, the Cisco Annual Security Report also took in depth look into how the next-generation workforce’s behavior heightens personal and corporate risk amid a complex threat landscape.

Some of the key trends, he said include dramatic decline in spam volume, which according to Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (SIO), spam volume dropped from more than 379 billion messages daily to about 124 billion messages daily between August 2010 and November 2011—levels not seen since 2007.

The impact on the business of cybercrime is significant, as said by Cisco SIO, which estimated that the cybercriminal benefit resulting from traditional mass email-based attacks declined more than 50 percent; on an annualized basis from June 2010 to June 2011 – from US $1billion to US $500 million.

“Looking into which countries spam volumes are originating from worldwide, in the month of September 2011, India had the highest percentage of spam volume 13.9 per cent,” he said, stressing that Vietnam came in second with 8.0 per cent and The Russian Federation took the third-place spot with 7.8 percent. 

Cisco Cybercrime Return on Investment (CROI) Matrix, the report showed that the Cisco CROI Matrix, which made its debut in the Cisco 2009 Annual Security Report, analyzes types of cybercrime that Cisco’s security experts predict profit-oriented scammers will channel their resources toward in 2012.

Based on performance in 2011, the matrix predicts that mobile devices, along with cloud infrastructure hacking will rise in prevalence in 2012.

ITRealms Online further learnt that money laundering is also expected to remain a key focus area for cybercrime investment.

“A not-so- surprising newcomer among the “Rising Stars” is Mobile Devices, which was listed in the “Potentials” category in the 2010 matrix.

The report equally revealed that cybercriminals, as a rule, focus their attention on where the users are, and increasingly, people are accessing the Internet, email, and corporate networks via powerful mobile devices.

“Mobile device attacks have been around for years now, but historically have not been widespread, and were more akin to research projects than successful cybercrime businesses. But that’s changing fast,” part of the report read.

Even as there are more businesses embracing cloud computing and hosted services, hence cybercriminals are also looking to the cloud in search of money making opportunities.

Remmy Nweke
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