Cybercrime on an upward spiral

Online financial fraud attacks have spread too. New research indicates that Operation High Roller, a financial fraud ring identified earlier this year by McAfee Labs and Guardian Analytics, has now spread outside Europe, including to the United States and Colombia. Cybercriminals set up an automated transfer system (ATS) that was used to attack European financial institutions, and set out to target a major US multinational financial institution.

“Cybercrime exhibits few signs of slowing down,” says Vincent Weafer, senior vice-president of McAfee Labs. “Though we tend to highlight the numbers, the fact is that we continue to see increased sophistication of attacks. Cybercrime, hacktivism, and cyber warfare are in a continual state of evolution. Everyone from governments to large enterprises, small business and home users are facing a wider range of digital threats from these forces, as they gain more actionable intelligence on their victims, and leverage the newest attack platforms and exploits tools to launch their campaigns. We all need to equip ourselves with basic situation awareness to our online risks and how best to prevent and combat these threats.”

Clearly IT needs be vigilant and take preemptive steps against cyber attacks, says Marvin Blough, vice-president, worldwide sales at SonicWall. San Jose-based SonicWall offers a range of firewall, anti-spam, remote access and network, backup and email security solutions, rivaling the likes of Cisco, Juniper and McAfee, among many other vendors. The security specialist was recently acquired by Dell with a view to complement the latter’s security solutions portfolio, enabling it

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