In 2014, McAfee Labs expects that Ransomware will proliferate on mobile devices, attacks using advanced evasion techniques will come of age, and social platforms will be used more aggressively to target the finances and personal information of consumers, and the intellectual property and trade secrets of business leaders.

Security experts at Unisys Corporation predict that the coming year will usher in broad-based adoption of encryption as enterprises respond to recent disclosures that unencrypted data traffic inside enterprises is vulnerable to detection from outsiders.

Shoppers who used credit cards or debit cards at Target between November 27 and December 15, 2013 may have been hacked.

The World Federation of Exchanges launched a cyber security committee to collaborate on finding the most effective ways to protect the global capital markets from cyber crime, Reuters reports. The Cyber Security Working Group will be chaired by Mark Graff, chief information security officer at Nasdaq OMX Group, and vice-chaired by Jerry Perullo, who heads information security at Intercontinental Exchange Group, and the committee is made up of members from dozens of exchanges and clearing houses, the article says.

Windows XP may be 12 years old, but the operating system still owns roughly 31 percent of the market share to date – that’s an estimated 500 million PCs, according to Net Market Share.

Cyber threats are the “new normal” for the financial services industry, according to Booz Allen in its annual list of the “Top Financial Services Cyber Security Trends for 2014.”

Kroll's annual Cyber Security Forecast highlights seven trends identified by Kroll and suggests that a changing tide in cyber standards, both social and legal, will require organizations to take stronger actions and safeguards to protect against reputational, financial and legal risks in 2014.

Mobile shopping is expected to increase dramatically this holiday season – mobile commerce spending on smartphones and tablets in the U.S. increased $5.8 billion in Q3, however, during the same period, mobile malware threats increased 26 percent, making consumers more than more vulnerable to mobile cyber attacks.

 

In last month’s column, we explored the Top Five Reasons to Report Computer Intrusions to Law Enforcement.  This month’s column will provide you with a sense of what your company, as a victim of a computer intrusion, should expect when working with the Feds.

In an effort to thwart snooping from the NSA and other entities, Twitter has implemented "perfect forward secrecy," which should make it impossible to decrypt any stolen or eavesdropped communication in the future.