New net infrastructure faces cybercrime threat

Virtualisation, cloud-computing and a shifting internet infrastructure will widen the scope of cybercrime in 2010.

According to Trend Micro's 2010 future threat report, cloud computing and virtualisation move servers outside the traditional security perimeter and expand the playing field for cybercriminals.

The industry already witnessed danger/sidekick's cloud-based server failure that caused major data outages in November 2009, highlighting cloud-computing risks that cybercriminals will likely abuse.

Trend Micro said cybercriminals will either be manipulating the connection to the cloud, or attacking the data centre and cloud itself. The internet infrastructure is changing, which has opened opportunities for cybercrime. The "next-generation" protocol designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force, Internet Protocol v 6, is still in the experimentation stages of replacing the current IPv4.

As users start to explore IPv6, so will cybercriminals, and we can expect to see proof-of-concept elements in IPv6 start to materialise in the upcoming new year.

Possible avenues for abuse include new covert channels or C&C. But do not expect active targeting of IPv6 address space – at least not in the near future.

Domain names are becoming more internationalised and the introduction of regional top-level domains (Russian, Chinese, and Arabic characters) will create new opportunities to launch age-old attacks through lookalike domains for phishing – using Cyrillic characters in place of similar looking Latin characters.

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