Until this year, people seeking a thrill from the chaos they could cause on the Internet accounted for most of the viruses. The malevolent code is hidden in an e-mail attachment that the sender tries to trick a person into opening by pretending the message is from a legitimate vendor or someone who can be trusted, like a friend.
Spammers are now using the same techniques to get PC users to unknowingly install applications that allow the machines to be used later to relay spam. The pre-eminent example of this kind of malevolent code was the Sobig.F virus, which had such an effective mass-mailing engine that it managed to shut down some corporate and government networks.
"The authors behind Sobig were definitely spammers using the virus to harvest lots of machines to blast spam," Sunner said.
Relaying spam through other computers enable spammers to remain anonymous and avoid law enforcement agencies. In addition, by hiding the original source of the mass-mailings, spammers can avoid black lists used by filtering software to separate spam from legitimate messages.
MessageLabs predicts that by April of next year, 70 percent of the e-mail traffic on the Internet will be spam, up from 50 percent today. "To be honest, I think that figure is really quite conservative," Sunner said.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
