http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=166029



By Kelly Jackson Higgins

Senior Editor

Dark Reading

OCTOBER 15, 2008



Cellphones will become members of botnets. VOIP systems will get hit by 

blackmailing denial-of-service attacks. The cybercrime economy will 

thrive, even as the global economy struggles.



And today, around 15 percent of all computers online are infected as 

bots, up from 10 percent last year, according to the Georgia Tech 

Information Security Center's (GTISC) new report on emerging cyber 

threats for 2009 and beyond.



“Compared with viruses and spam, botnets are growing at a faster rate,” 

said botnet researcher Wenke Lee, an associate professor at GTISC in the 

report, which was released today at the GTISC Security Summit on 

Emerging Cyber Security Threats.



And it’s not just your laptop or desktop that’s at risk of botnet 

recruitment. One of the next big threats will be the bad guys injecting 

malware onto cellphones to infect them as bots. Those botnets then could 

be used against the wireless infrastructure.



“Large cellular botnets could then be used to perpetrate a DoS 

[denial-of-service] attack against the core of the cellular network,” 

said Patrick Traynor, assistant professor in the School of Computer 

Science at Georgia Tech and a member of GTISC. “But because the mobile 

communications field is evolving so quickly, it presents a unique 

opportunity to design security properly -- an opportunity we missed with 

the PC.”



[...]





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Received on Thu Oct 16 2008 - 01:08:49 PDT