2005–It’s almost over and what a tough year it was for both

network administrators and end users in terms of security.  Leaks of financial data left over 50 million

accounts open for exploitation, phishing attacks have been steadily increasing

and bot nets have continued to grow.

While worm attacks have subsided we are seeing increasing trojan

infection taking hold with the help of client side exploits and vulnerabilities

(mostly in Internet Explorer).  Once

infected, most of these machines will become part of a bot net, these are used

for various shady activities including the stealing of sensitive data (credit

card details etc), spamming and distributed denial of service attacks.

It’s not just the Internet underworld who have caused a stir

this year, Sony BMG has came under heavy pressure when it was discovered that their

DRM (Digital Rights Management) software acted exactly as a malicious rootkit

would, installing itself without giving any notification to the user and

leaving no evidence of it’s activities. 

Sony BMG has been forced to withdraw CD’s incorporating the software in

question and proposed settlement for six cases filed against it in

the Southern District of New York.

What will 2006 bring us?  I won’t make any wild predictions, we’ll just
have to wait and see!

Wishing everyone a happy new year.