Virtualization, online games, Web 2.0 top security risks, McAfee says

In its "Top Ten Security Predictions for 2008," McAfee foresees the growth of virtualization opening up a huge attack surface. On the good-news side, the security vendor expects there will be less adware on the Internet to worry about. McAfee's list comes in the wake of archrival Symantec this week predicting its top five security threats for next year. Craig Schmugar and Dave Marcus, researchers at McAfee’s Avert Labs, shared this list:

* Web 2.0. Web-based social-networking sites, hosted applications, wikis and the like are way ahead in function but behind in security, according to McAfee. Active sites will continue to be victims of crosssite scripting attacks and malware exploits.

* Botnets. These are going to be Artful Dodgers, following the style of the largest botnet around today, Storm, “which radically changes its methods over time,” Schmugar says. “Storm is a trend-setter. A lot of the spam we see is coming across Storm-compromised machines, including PDF and image spam.”

* Instant messaging/instant malware. On the horizon is a “self-executing IM worm,” Schmugar predicts. “The ingredients are coming together, more critical vulnerabilities targeting IM clients.” Count on it.

* Online games. Password-stealing Trojans have emerged as a new type of threat to millions of game players. “Virtual objects in games are worth money,” Schmugar notes. “It’s lower risk than targeting a bank.”

* Microsoft’s Vista software. Has it seemed fairly quiet on the security front since Microsoft shipped Vista last year? McAfee says that quiet period is coming to an end, now that the installed base is growing slowly to 10% of desktop operating systems. That’s the threshold at which a platform is targeted more aggressively, Marcus says.

* Decline of adware. “The government, such as the Federal Trade Commission, has been successful fighting against it,” Marcus says. “Advertisers don’t like the association with adware. Some of the programs we now see are considered Trojans.”

* Phishing. Attackers are not going just after the larger targets, such as PayPal and eBay, and the big banks. Phishing is now ubiquitous, hitting MySpace users and any online Web site imaginable.

* Parasitics. Though not a wholly new category of malware, parasitics — which look for a specific file on your system into which they embed themselves and then spread, rather than just make a copy of themselves — are having a renaissance. “We've seen a 400% increase in parasitics [such as] Philis in 2007,” Schmugar says. “Virut is active and Almanahe, which has a rootkit.” To combat an infection by parasitics, “you have to isolate the parasitic code within the host code,” he says. “If it overwrites the good code, you may never get it back. The parasitic outbreaks we’ve seen this year have been very distracting.”

* Virtualization. To McAfee, the spread of virtualization into the enterprise widens the potential attack surface. “You’re opening up the exposure plane,” Marcus argues. According to McAfee, attackers can do everything they did before in a traditional computing environment and more.