Phishers Hone Skills, Craft More Impressive Attacks

CWmike writes "Recent break-ins at high-profile targets like the International Monetary Fund demonstrate just how proficient hackers have become at so-called spear phishing, researchers said on Tuesday. 'Today's spear phishing is not only more prevalent but also much more technically proficient,' said Dave Jevans, chairman of the Anti-Phishing Working Group. 'They're not going for a password, anymore; they're getting people to install crimeware on their computers.' The trend highlights the need for defenses against such targeted threats, requiring companies to look beyond security strategies focused purely on dealing with traditional network threats, analysts said. Increasingly, companies also need to focus on approaches such as continuous monitoring of networks, databases, applications and users, outbound traffic filtering and whitelisting."

Comments

Re:Maybe it's time...

[AmiMoJo]

To be fair to some of these guys I think people of older generations were not taught to solve problems like we were, instead they learned by committing a series of steps to memory. There was a great XKCD about this, but basically they are stuck if the sequence they learnt doesn't work for some reason. Even something as simple as their USB flash drive being drive X instead of drive Y is enough if your brain works that way.

You can see this effect at work in IQ tests. Since the 50s they have been getting steadily harder, to the point where someone who scored 100 in 1950 would only get about 80 now - technically mentally deficient. Obviously people in the 50s were not idiots, they were just not taught problem solving at school, and even are pre-school level they didn't have all the educational toys that promote that kind of thinking like we did.

I'm not saying older people should not make an effort, just that the amount of effort is orders of magnitude more than we require to master something new.