In the next year, Genes said click fraud, more sophisticated phishing attacks and VoIP will be the bane of hackers looking to compromise PCs. Websites that have the same look and feel of mainstream sites and contain links to adware and other malware are becoming more popular than email worms or spam, Genes said.
According to Trend Micro, there are 5 million zombie PCs or botnets, sending out spam, malware or are programmed to send out phishing attempts.
McAfee also made its own predictions for 2007. The PC security vendor listed mobile phone malware attacks in its list of top 10 threats for 2007. It also predicts that parasitic malware, or programs that modify files on infected PCs will pose an increased threat.
Symantec joined the chorus of security vulnerability predictions for 2007, too. The company cited phishing as a growing trend; it detected close to 900 unique phishing messages per day in 2006, almost double the number per day it monitored over the previous six months.
The other prediction it made, which speaks directly to software manufacturers, is increasing attacks against unpatched security vulnerabilities. It took software programmers an average of 31 days to fix security holes in software code, but the average time it took hackers to exploit the vulnerability was three days.
