And it's getting increasingly pernicious. Messages that once pitched herbal remedies or guarantees to enlarge certain body parts now arrive ready to infect computers with viruses, spyware, or keylogging software. Once they round up enough contaminated PCs, spammers potentially can control networks of zombie bots they can use to send even more tainted e-mail or to command distributed denial of service attacks.
"The vicious content in the e-mail stream right now is beyond belief," says Neil Schwartzman, chairman of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) in Canada. "We're not talking about the old scams we saw from a few years ago. It's a lot nastier."
Schwartzman foresees a time when zombies are employed for purposes far more devastating than sending junk e-mail. "The use of zombies as a tool in tandem with a real-world terrorist attack will happen, I have no doubt. It's obviously a scary proposition. To compound a real-world attack, it could be effective."
For example, zombies could be used to call 911 simultaneously and overwhelm the emergency response capability of a particular municipality. In a similar scenario, Christopher Maxwell, 20, of Vacaville, California, pleaded guilty in May to shutting down computers, physicians' pagers, and operating room doors in the intensive care unit at Northwest Hospital and Medical Center in Seattle by means of a botnet attack.
Phishing Comes To The Fore
On top of that, there's yet another type of spam that wreaks serious financial losses for its victims: phishing, the trick of fraudulently acquiring personal information, usually about credit cards or other accounts. Spammers aren't just pushing snake oil anymore; they're trying to clean out your bank account.
 |
||||
|
|
|
||
|
Hidden Costs
|
|
||
|
||||
Nearly six out of ten business PC users receive at least one phishing e-mail every day, and 22 percent receive more than five a day, according to a recent poll conducted by computer security firm Sophos Plc. Phishing attempts worldwide have nearly doubled, the Anti-Phishing Working Group found. The organization, whose 1,500 corporate members include eight of the top 10 U.S. banks and four of the top five U.S. ISPs, detected 15,244 unique phishing reports in December 2005, up from 8,829 in December 2004.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
