Cited from The Background Investigator
The Background Investigator March 2009 Issue

Something New To Worry About, Cloud Computing

What will frighten us this year?

Apart from terrorism, the growth of our waistlines after last Christmas, the credit crunch and its effect on our jobs and wallets, you mean?

There are going to be plenty of things online to fret about, say internet security companies.

Top of the list of scary things is cloud computing, claim security providers Websense and Lumension.

They reckon that the cloud - where software and data is held on servers owned by a third-party provider such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services - gives the bad guys more opportunities to steal sensitive data and trade secrets.

A total of 61% of those responding to Lumension's survey said they were concerned about the possibility, while Websense predicts a rise in misuse of the cloud - either as a vector for more spam or as a place where malicious software can be hosted.

Outsourcing is already a worry, says Lumension, which warns that the chilly economic climate means that businesses will try to reduce their IT spend by relying even more on outsourcing. It says that the main concerns are people outside the organisation having access to sensitive data and the possibility that the data might not be adequately protected while it's being moved around - shades of lost CD-Roms spring to mind.

And as those who still have jobs increasingly work away from the office, Lumension warns that next year there will more concerns about authenticating an increasing number of users as they log on remotely. "Securing an organisation's

IT environment is an uphill battle," says Larry Poneman, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute.

Websense is also worried about the growth of browser-based web technologies such as Google Gears, Adobe's Air and Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight.

Gazing into its crystal ball, it says: "We predict that in 2009 we will see some large-scale attacks using exploits found within the core Rich Internet Application components as well as user-created services that allow attackers to remotely execute code on users' machines."

Finjan, another security provider, agrees that Flash and its counterparts are going to cause problems next year. "Using rich content applications such as Flash files to distribute malicious code has become the latest trend in cybercrime," says Yuval Ben-Itzhak of Finjan.

And try not to annoy your IT guys in what's left of this year: Finjan reckons that unemployed former IT professionals will be joining forces with the bad guys. Cybercriminals will deploy "the latest technologies, especially sophisticated data-stealing Trojans," warns Ben-Itzhak.

It might even be dangerous to visit reputable websites, says Websense: it predicts that 80% of malicious content will be sneakily hosted on big news and sports sites. Suddenly, worrying about your waistline seems pretty minor. Merry Christmas.