MCAFEE RELEASES 2011 TOP CYBER ATTACK TARGETS

McAfee, just acquired by Intel, has released its list of top cyber attach targets for 2011. Topping the list is URL Shortners followed by GeoLocation and Mobile.

URL Shorteners:
McAfee Labs says that URL-shortening services, which create more than 3,000 URLs per minute, will be a significant target for cyber criminals in 2011. Because social media sites are already riddles with cyber criminals, these links are going to be used for spam, scamming and other malicious purposes, says the company. Interestingly, McAfee recently launched its own URL shortener, McAf.ee

GeoLocation Services:
Geolocation services, such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places, are expected to also be a security target as cybercriminals can see in real time who is Tweeting, where they are located, what they are saying, what their interests are, and what operating systems and applications they are using. McAfee says this personal information that is publicly shared allows cyber criminals to create a targeted attack.

Mobile:
mobile is expected to a huge target in 2011 as more consumers and businesses use smartphones. McAfee says that this increase in usage, combined with “historically fragile cellular infrastructure and slow strides toward encryption,” will put user data on mobile phones at high risk for an attack.

McAfee also named Apple as a target. The Mac OS platform has been known for warding off cyber criminals but the McAfee Labs warns that Mac-targeted malware will continue to increase in sophistication in 2011. And as iPads and iPhones populate businesses, there is the risk for data and identity exposure.

With the dawn of controversial site Wikileaks, McAfee says that next year will also bring more politically motivated attacks to the web. McAfee Labs says that “hacktivism” will become the a new form of political demonstration. [TechCrunch]

GOO.GL GOES LIVE

Google's URL shortener has moved out of the beta lab and gone mainstream.  According to Google' blog post

There are many shorteners out there with great features, so some people may wonder whether the world really needs yet another. As we said late last year, we built goo.gl with a focus on quality. With goo.gl, every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast, and it will keep working. You also know that when you click a goo.gl shortened URL, you’re protected against malware, phishing and spam using the same industry-leading technology we use in search and other products. Since our initial release, we’ve continued to invest in the core quality of the service:


Stability: We’ve had near 100% uptime since our initial launch, and we’ve worked behind the scenes to make goo.gl even stabler and more robust.
Security: We’ve added automatic spam detection based on the same type of filtering technology we use in Gmail.
Speed: We’ve more than doubled our speed in just over nine months.


The URL shortener will also link with your Google Account to allow you to access a list of URLs you have shortened along with details about those URLs.  Real-time analytics will also be available including traffic over time, top referrers and visitor profiles.

With Google's entry the URL shortening field is quickly getting full with Twitter launching their product, Bit.ly being the original and Yahoo debuting their entry soon. [TechCrunch]