7 Worrying Data Security Trends

The following appears on work intelligent.ly

The number of potential vulnerabilities continues to skyrocket, with data thieves growing more sophisticated, more targeted, and more numerous. With that in mind, we picked seven of the most worrying trends; not to feed your nightmares, but to discuss their business impact and what you can do to protect against them.

1. THE NUMBER OF ANDROID MALWARE APPS HAS REACHED 10 MILLION.

This is according to a recent report from virus researchers at Kaspersky. This means that your average mobile phone likely has some nasty stuff already downloaded on it. Businesses need to protect their phones with a variety of mobile device managers. Check out a few of the top tools I reviewed last year for Network World.

2. PHISHING IS ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE.

Have you gotten an email with “an invitation to connect on LinkedIn” in the subject line? Turns out that this is the most popular phishing line out there, according to Websense. Train your users to be more careful, and employ better screening tools in your email servers to block this stuff from ever coming into your networks to begin with.

3. FAKE AV CONTINUES TO SPREAD.

A third nightmare goes under the name of FakeAV or ransomware. This is software that masquerades as a real anti-virus tool, but instead tricks you into downloading it and then holds your hard disk hostage until you pay up. Again, screening tools and proper user education is essential here.

4. SOCIAL NETWORKS CAN BE VERY EFFECTIVE MALWARE SPREADERS.

As the world becomes better connected, the bad guys are using social networks to quickly spread their infections. Look how many times this scam about a girl killing herself on Facebook has traveled around the world. This is even more harmful because getting a message from someone on your network engenders a certain level of trust. Keep in mind that next generation firewalls can block some of this activity.