Security Summary for 2004: The year of phishing, professional virus-writing, and arrests.

[lists at lisnews.com]

the F-Secure Corporation has a rather nice look back at 2004: Security
Summary for 2004: The year of phishing, professional virus-writing, and
arrests.

http://www.f-secure.com/2004/

They look back at 2004 and call it a mixed bag. The beginning of the year
was record-breaking busy with a huge number of major new virus outbreaks.
However, since June, things calmed down and we've only had a few serious
outbreaks since. New trends in 2004 were primarily the massive increase in
phishing email scams, introduction of open-source botnets - networks of
infected machines harnessed for malicious operations, and for-profit
virus-writing, but this year was also the best year ever in actually
catching virus writers and other cyber criminals.

This quote caught my eye:

"Current email systems are in serious trouble. I'm afraid we need to do a
major overhaul of the underlying email standards in the near future. This
would mean changing the basic protocols to more robust ones and adding
strong user authentication. This would be a massive and very expensive
project...which means it won't be done until the current email systems
simply stop working"

There are days I think we're already there, if I had a tenth of a cent for
each SPAM message that comes into LISHost, I'd be a millionaire in a week.

-----
Blake Carver
LISNews.com
http://lisnews.com