Top Trends in Cyber Attacks 2012: Juniper Networks

According to Mr. Kyle Adams, Chief Software Architect for Mykonos at Juniper Networks, the Most Interesting Developments in the threat landscape that emerged in 2012 are, Simple attack methods on web applications remain effective - Many of the large public companies this year fell victim to web application vulnerabilities like SQL Injection and Cross Site Scripting. These types of attacks have been known about for several years and remain a popular hacking method because of the relatively low level of sophistication needed and the potential difficulty in preventing them.

Mobile malware and application-centric threats continue to pose a risk to enterprise data - With the continued adoption of Bring Your Own Device policies in the workplace, the risk of mobile malware and invasive applications infiltrating critical corporate data continues to be a top concern.

Increased transparency about data breaches - As the frequency of data breaches continues to increase, companies are judged more on how they handle incidents than if they experience an issue. It seems that many companies, who in the past would have hidden a breach, are now being open and honest about it with the public and their customers.

Botnets take a beating - Building on earlier success, public/private partnerships were successful in taking down several prominent botnets responsible for everything from spam to the Zeus banking Trojan. Through a combination of forensic security research and novel legal arguments, researchers were able to block the command and control systems of some of the most infamous botnets.