Online voting, the London Olympics and attacks on infrastructure highlight 2012 security predictions from Internet Identity.

“Cyber criminals have gotten much smarter about capitalizing on current events to swindle victims. In this sense, cyber criminals are acting just as much like psychologists and pollsters as thieves,” said Rod Rasmussen, president and CTO of the Tacoma, Wash, online security firm.

IID's list, in no particular order, of the top enterprise security risks to watch out for in 2012 is as follows:

London Summer Olympics; cybercriminals will look to capitalize on the hype by tricking people with phishing scams impersonating the Summer Olympics official website and/or official Summer Olympics vendors.
Elections altered; with 2012 being a presidential election year, and many U.S. states allowing military and overseas voting via the Internet, cybercriminals are expected to try to take advantage.
12/21/2012 danger; much has been said and speculated about the Mayan end of times of Dec. 21, 2012. Bank on the fact that cyber criminals will play into this fear through targeted phishing and malware attacks playing on people's heightened awareness surrounding 12/21/2012.
Internet infrastructure attacks for financial gain; while “hacktivism” will persist, expect DNS and other attacks for financial gain to grab headlines in 2012.
Physical infrastructure attacks carried out over the Internet; expect to see real world infrastructure damage (power plants, utilities, etc.) and destruction of enterprises' physical assets, both threatened and caused, by hacking in 2012.

Instant Insights /

Cyber Crime 2012: IID Predicts Summer Olympic, Voting, Infrastructure as Targets

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