As in the real world, cyberspace has bad neighborhoods. But unlike the real world, risks in cyberspace are not easy to spot — and the location of those digital bad neighborhoods can change all the time.
When security experts look back at 2010, they will see a major turning point in the world of cyberscares. The virtual and the real collided in new, dramatic ways during the past 12 months, and the Internet will never be the same.
Gone for good is the glamour of annoying outages caused by hackers sending e-mail attachments and launching Web page attacks. Now, computer criminals are being credited with stalling a rogue nuclear power plant program, and with bringing world diplomacy to its knees. Things are getting serious.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about the virus named Stuxnet. Unlike 99 percent of the viruses written before it, this malicious program was designed to leave most of the Internet untouched. In fact, it wasn’t even written in a language that could infect normal Web users. Instead, it apparently was written to cripple nuclear power plants by some entity that had insider knowledge of how utilities work. Stuxnet may have found its way into an Iranian nuclear power plant and mucked up its operations, according to various reports. True or not, Stuxnet sent shudders through the computer security world, and will likely inspire copycat “targeted” attacks for years.
Meanwhile, WikiLeaks showed how technology can turn a David-vs.-Goliath match into a fairly even battle. Non-tech journalists were simply flabbergasted that a man like Julian Assange could take on the U.S. government — or any government — so directly, and that government had so little power to stop him. What Assange did has already had serious real-world consequences, and they are ongoing. Assange was a teenage hacker before he became a political activist, and he might be considered the first Web-age hacker to have “grown up” — he is what a hacker who doesn’t ultimately get a job in computer security can turn into. He is destined to become the hero of every teenager with a little programming skill and a cause.
Sure, there have been plenty of cyberskirmishes fought in the name of activism, and there have been Twitter and Facebook campaigns aplenty – such as the Twitter-aided Iranian “revolution” of 2009. But those did not have anywhere near the impact of Stuxnet or WikiLeaks. Indeed, 2010 will be remembered as the year things changed. And those changes headline the top 10 things Internet users need to fear most in 2011.
At the same time, a more subtle, but perhaps more immediate danger for Web consumers surrounds the explosion of off-the-PC Internet applications. The Web is on nearly half of U.S. cell phones now, but that’s only the beginning. It’s also on TVs, DVD players, tablets like the iPad and even kitchen appliances. What’s the risk? How many consumers do you know that are ready to purchase anti-virus software for their blu-ray players? Predictions have been made for a long time about mobile Web viruses. Given the explosion of new, unprotected gadgets, 2011 appears to be their year.
On to the list. We will begin with the biggest consumer-grade threats, then work our way up to the most dramatic possibilities created by the success of Stuxnet and WikiLeaks.
Source:-http://www.khq.com/Global/story.asp?S=13749729
