White Paper: Protecting Data From The Cyber Theft Pandemic

Malware-related data breaches have reached pandemic proportions as criminals discover that Internet crime is easy to commit, highly lucrative, and largely under-policed. With a few hundred dollars, a cyber criminal can begin a career of breaking into computers to steal identity and confidential data for sale to the highest bidder. Fraudsters who purchase the data have developed a variety of schemes to monetize that information ranging from transacting unauthorized stock trades to transferring funds to offshore bank accounts. The cyber crime economy is so robust that there is a vibrant market for professional malware toolkits available for $500 to $1,000 and come pre-configured with a range of attack modules, exploit ‘maintenance' updates, and 24 x 7 online technical support.

This white paper will cover current and emerging trends of stealth malware, such as moving primarily to the Web since most organizations allow Web traffic into the network. It will also cover new advances in network security technologies that use multi-phase heuristic and virtual machine analysis to detect and mitigate the damages that result from malware-related data thefts.