 As a faithful Cenzic blog reader, you are the first to get our latest Web application security trend report. The report comprises data from the last two quarters of 2008 and has some interesting results.
As we’d predicted during the first two quarters of 2008, cyber attacks continued increased during the second half of 2008 and at a much faster pace, most of them coming through Web applications – a staggering 80%! Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter got hit by various Cross-Site Scripting attacks. Millions of users and liberal use of Web 2.0 technologies are making the social networking Web sites prime targets for hackers. Attacks against many financial institutions -- including one of the largest in history against Heartland -- continued to prevail throughout the second half of 2008. Many political hacktivism attacks resulted in countries defacing one another’s Websites with the usual suspect countries including India, Pakistan, Israel, Palestine, Russia, Georgia and China. It’s clear that this war is currently being fought on the hackers’ terms and they are, for the most part, winning. With the economy at its worst in a few decades and unemployment at historically high levels, we are starting to see trends toward insider threats. Many employees who have been laid off instill back doors and create holes in the infrastructure before they leave so they can attack when they are out. In fact, some of the insiders are collaborating with the hackers for a mutual financial gain. Enjoy the report. by
Mandeep Khera, CMO at Cenzic
Mandeep@cenzic.com | 
