Social media has become a top target of hackers and mobile devices are expanding that target, IBM reported last week in its X-Force 2013 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report.
Attacks on businesses are getting increasingly sophisticated, the report said. Some attacks studied by IBM researchers were opportunistic—exploiting unpatched and untested web applications vulnerable to basic SQL injection or cross-site scripting.
Others were successful, the report continued, because they violated the basic trust between end user and sites or social media personalities thought to be safe and legitimate.
"Social media has become a new playground for attackers," said Kevin Skapinetz, program director for product strategy for IBM Security Systems.
The report noted that a growing trend this year is the takeover of social media profiles that have a large number of followers. The trend continues to play a pivotal role in the way attackers are reaching their targets.
"It's one thing to get an email or spam from someone you've never heard of," Skapinetz said in an interview. "It's another thing to have one of your friends have their account compromised and send you a link that might interest you."
Traditional sources of online aggravation can't resist the siren call of social media, either. "Even if email is used in an attack, it will be under guise of coming from a social media account," he said. "Attackers are becoming more operationally sophisticated."
Social media attacks can affect more than the usual suspects, too. Social media exploits affect more than individuals; they can negatively impact enterprise brand reputation and cause financial losses, the report said.
Mobile devices are also becoming a hacker magnet. "Although mobile vulnerabilities continue to grow at a rapid pace, we still see them as a small percentage of overall vulnerabilities reported in the year," the report said.
What may be making matters worse is the proliferation of mobile devices in the workplace under Bring Your Own Device Programs. "BYOD—what a nightmare that can be for any organization," HBGary's Threat Intelligence Director, Matthew Standart, said in an interview.
"It's difficult to protect your data even when you own all your devices and getting visibility into all your devices is a challenge in itself," Standard said. "Allowing users to bring their own devices increases the complexity tenfold."
The IBM report also noted that Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are being used for more than just disrupting service at target sites. The attacks are being used as a distraction, allowing attackers to breach other systems in the enterprise.
"Both attacks and attack threats are being used as decoys," Marc Gaffan, co-founder of Incapsula, said in an interview.
"The attackers will bring down a website, get the IT people focused in a certain direction, tie up their resources on the DDoS attack while a more sophisticated breach is performed with no one paying attention," Gaffan said.
A decoy attack could also be used in conjunction with a phishing attack, he added. For example, a phishing message could be sent to a bank's customers asking them to use an alternative URL because the bank is having trouble with its common web address. A recipient may follow good security practices and paste the common URL for the bank in his browser.
Because the bank is under a DDoS attack, however, they can't connect to the institution, he said. So, in desperation, they click on the URL in the phishing message and get infected.
Those kinds of misdirection DDoS attacks, though, haven't become mainstream. "They are occurring, but they're relatively rare," said Daniel Peck, a research scientist at Barracuda Networks.
The IBM report also questioned the dedication of many organizations to sound security basics. "Many of the breaches reported in the last year were a result of poorly applied security fundamentals and policies and could have been mitigated by putting some basic security hygiene into practice," the researchers wrote.
"Attackers seem to be capitalizing on this 'lack of security basics' by using a model of operational sophistication that allows them to increase their return on exploit," they wrote.
"The idea that even basic security hygiene is not upheld in organizations, leads us to believe that, for a variety of reasons, companies are struggling with a commitment to apply basic security fundamentals," the researchers wrote.
Barry Shteiman, senior security strategist with Imperva, said in an interview that the lack of adherence to basics could be due to a fundamental misunderstanding of security by companies. "They don't understand the difference between a safety belt and auto insurance," he said. "They don't understand that it's more important to protect themselves than to preserve their reputation after a breach has been made."
John Mello writes on technology and cyber security for a number of online publications and is former managing editor of the Boston Business Journal and Boston Phoenix.
More by John P. Mello Jr
The iPhone 5s includes a capacitive fingerprint scanner. 
Apple revealed the details of the fingerprint scanner at the iPhone 5s launch event. 
Once you share a mobile album, others can add, edit, and even download photos (if you granted permission to do so when you shared the album), though only the person who uploaded a photo can delete it. Elements 12 EditorIn the Adobe Elements Editor’s Quick mode, you’ll spot three new buttons at the bottom right of the window: Effects, Textures, and Frames. Applying these Instagram-style treatments is a single-click affair, though clicking the single Reset Image button at the top of these panels removes all the effects, textures, or frames that you’ve applied. To undo specific effects, you have to click into each panel separately and then click Undo from the Action Bar. It’s a little awkward. 
In Quick mode, you can create Instagram-style treatments using the new Effects, Textures, and Frames buttons (the Light Leak effect and Aged frame are shown here). Click and drag a photo to reposition it within the frame. Switch to Guided mode and you’ll find three new step-by-step techniques: Zoom Burst Effect (for simulating motion), Puzzle Effect (for creating a puzzle out of your photo), and Restore Old Photo. That last one walks you through a complicated series of tasks including cropping, using the Spot Healing Brush, the Healing Brush, Clone Stamp tools, Dust Removal (which triggers the Dust & Scratches filter), Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Color Correction, conversion to black-and-white, and sharpening. Whew! 
The new Puzzle Effect guided edit lets you choose the puzzle-piece size, as well as select and extract individual pieces. When you’re finished extracting pieces, you can switch to Expert mode, activate the layer of an extracted piece, and use the Free Transform tool to rotate it. Take a peek in the Enhance menu, and you’ll find a new Auto Smart Tone feature for automatic lighting and contrast corrections. Using a unique, on-image interface, you can fine-tune the autocorrections by clicking and dragging a joystick controller in the direction of a corrected image thumbnail (they’re positioned at each corner of the dialog box). By dragging the joystick toward a thumbnail, you apply more of that particular correction. 
If the object you want to move has free space around it, and you don’t move it very far, the Content-Aware Move tool works well. That said, you may need to do some cleanup with the Clone Stamp tool. Last but not least, photographers will appreciate the File menu’s new ‘Open in Camera Raw’ command for opening supported file formats in the Camera Raw plug-in; and, happily, you can now delete layers by pressing the Delete key on your keyboard. 
The new Auto Smart Tone feature is intuitive: It remembers how you fine-tune corrections in order to apply them the next time you use the feature. The interface also includes a handy Before/After switch at the bottom left. Bottom lineFamily memoirists will love the Restore Old Photos guided edit, while the Auto Smart Tone feature saves time for the snap-happy. Fixing a pet’s eyes and repositioning items in a photo is highly useful, and the former is unique to this program. iPhonography fans will dig the mobile albums, and scrapbookers will adore Effects, Frames, and Textures. If you use Elements regularly, this upgrade is worth the money; if you’ve outgrown iPhoto, then Photoshop Elements 12 is the next logical step. 
PCWorld (US)Intel CEO Brian Krzanich 
