syssec_red_book

22 ENISA Threat Landscape and IndustrialThreat ReportsWhat are the future threats in cyber security? This is the mainquestion addressed in this report produced by ENISA, the EuropeanNetwork and Information Security Agency: a center of networkand information security expertise for the EU, its member states, the privatesector and Europe’s citizens. The ENISA Threat Landscape [268], a deliverableof the ENISA work programme of 2012, has been released on September 28,2012, with the objective of describing the cyber-security threat landscape byconsolidating existing threat reports. The main output of the report is a list ofthreats, threat agents and attack vectors.22.1 Current Threat TrendsThe report presents a list of current threats, along with the threat agents involvedand, more importantly, an overall indication of the current trend. Besides spam,which is ranked as the only decreasing threat, the remainder threats are eitherincreasing or stable.The most relevant treat agents identified include, in order of novelty, hacktivists(a new trend that involve socially an politically-motivated individualswho target high profile websites to protest), terrorists (who today rely on cyberweapons to target critical infrastructures), nation states (which, with defensepurposes, also rely on cyber weapons), cybercriminals (who have increased theirskills toward more financial gain), corporations (which rely on offensive technologiesor cybercriminals to gain competitive advantage over competitors),and employess (both hostile and non-hostile, who are still the main insiderthreat agent).The above agents are involved in the following increasing threats, orderedby importance and frequency:1. Drive-by Exploits. Vulnerable browser third-party components (primarilyJava, but also Adobe Reader and Flash) are still the main target of drive-byexploits, which are mostly distributed through compromised legitimatesites.