Loss reduces from $1 billion to $500 millionTHE Cisco yearly security report has revealed a significant drop in spam volume from about 379 billion messages daily to about 124 billion messages between August 2010 and November 2011.However, the impact on businesses, according to Cisco SIO, which results from traditional mass email-based attacks, declined more than 50 per cent from June 2010 to June 2011, from $ 1billion to $500 million.According to the report, spam volumes are originating worldwide in the month of September 2011; India had the highest percentage of spam volume (13.9 per cent). Vietnam came in second with 8.0 per cent and the Russian Federation took the third-place spot with 7.8 per cent.Cisco explained that after the 2010 cybercrime turning point, when spam levels started to decline for the first time, this trend continued throughout 2011, a trend that can be explained mainly by several key botnet takedowns throughout the last two years.It, however, said that the number of vulnerabilities increased, adding that there were fewer widespread attacks but greater numbers of smaller, more focused attacks.Continuing, the report predicted that profit-oriented scammers would channel their resources forward in 2012. It based this on the performance of 2011, predicting that mobile devices, along with cloud infrastructure hacking would rise in prevalence in 2012. '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. 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.'Meanwhile, as more businesses embrace cloud computing and hosted services, cybercriminals are also looking to the cloud in search of moneymaking opportunities,' the report noted.Furthermore, the Cisco report posited that seven out of 10 young employees frequently ignored IT policies, and one in four was a victim of identity theft before the age of 30.Cisco, in its Connected World Technology Report revealled startling attitudes toward IT policies and growing security threats posed by the next generation of employees entering the workforce ' a demographic that grew up with the Internet and had an increasingly on-demand lifestyle that mixed personal and business activity in the workplace.According to it, the desire for on-demand access to information was so ingrained in the incoming generation of employees that many young professionals took extreme measures to access the Internet, even if it compromised their company or their own security, adding that such behaviour included secretly using neighbours' wireless connections, sitting in front of businesses to access free Wi-Fi networks and borrowing other people's devices without supervision.Cisco said that considering that at least one of every three employees (36 per cent) responded negatively when asked if they respected their IT departments, balancing IT policy compliance with young employees' desires for more flexible access to social media, devices and remote access was testing the limits of traditional corporate cultures, at the same time, these employee demands were placing greater pressure on recruiters, hiring managers, IT departments and corporate cultures to allow more flexibility in the hope the next wave of talent could provide an edge over competitors.On the preview for 2012, as the threat landscape evolves, Cisco experts predicted that some of the main trends for 2012 would be the continued theme of targeted attacks replacing mass attacks, a continuing increase of hacktivism, and attacks on critical infrastructure systems, as well as industrial control systems and supervisory control and data acquisition systems.
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