Hackers have now been replaced by cyber criminals, professionals looking purely at ways of stealing your identity for profit. These cyber criminals are smart. They have many ways of trying to take your identity from you, tricking you using ‘social engineering' such as stealing credit card, bank account details, login names or passwords - any form of identity where they could create duplicate identities for a financial gain.
What are the latest threat trends?
The greatest online threat today is hidden exploits, a malicious code that is secretly downloaded onto your PC when you visit an infected website. This code can be used to steal your financial details, passwords and other information. According to Google, 1 in 1,000 Web pages currently have some kind of malicious code, mainly in the form of exploits delivered by these secret ‘drive-by downloads.' That translates to something like 70,000 poisoned pages ready and waiting to infect visitors on any given day.
Google also found that most antivirus programs could not detect all of these threats. At the current time, many of them detected only 70% of the drive-by downloads.
How can businesses beat the threats?
The situation is getting better as Internet Security software providers (like Norton, AVG and McAfee) adapt their programmes to fight the current threats, with new solutions, features and technology being brought in to overcome this. AVG were amongst the first to address this, with their Patent Pending LinkScanner technology. Unlike most other software, AVG's LinkScanner scans all the web pages you visit in real time, alerting you to the threat of any exploits that may be hidden there. It also does the same with results of any searches you carry out on Google, Yahoo or MSN without slowing down your surfing.
This article was brought to you by Easily.co.uk [1] trusted partner of AVG Internet Security