Brindle Media

If you use a smartphone and especially if you’re an iPhone, iPad or Mac user, pay attention. I know, the folks at The Apple Store told you that you really don’t need anti-virus protection because Apple products are virus-proof. But that could soon change. Like squirrels trying to access the food in your bird feeder, hackers are apparently obsessed with cracking the Apple codes.

PC Magazine reports:

McAfee on Tuesday (12/28/10) released its list of threat predictions for 2011 and it highlighted things like URL shorteners, location-based services, Apple products, and Internet TV. McAfee on Tuesday released its list of threat predictions for 2011 and it highlighted things like URL shorteners, location-based services, Apple products, and Internet TV.
What else made McAfee’s threat list?

• Hacktivism: McAfee predicted a rise in the number of politically motivated cyber attacks. “More groups will repeat the WikiLeaks example,” McAfee said, though strategy will become more sophisticated and leverage social networks.

• Friendly Fire: McAfee predicted a rise in the use of malicious content disguised as e-mail from sources you know. “Signed” malware that imitates legitimate files will become more prevalent, and “friendly fire,” in which threats appear to come from your friends but in fact are viruses such as Koobface or VBMania, will continue to grow as an attack of choice by cybercriminals, McAfee said. This could go hand-in-hand with social network attacks, which could eventually overtake e-mail attacks.

• Botnets: McAfee Labs predicts that the recent merger of Zeus with SpyEye will produce more sophisticated bots due to improvements in bypassing security mechanisms and law enforcement monitoring. Additionally, McAfee Labs expects to see a significant botnet activity in the adoption of data-gathering and data-removal functionality, rather than the common use of sending spam.

You can read the entire PC Magazine article here:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2374784,00.asp