McAfee predicts this year's emerging security hazard trends will become major issues in 2012-- with attacks targeting mobile banking and virtual wallets, while politically-motivated attacks and hacktivism will continue making the headlines.
“Many of the threats that will become prominent in 2012 have already been looming under the radar in 2011,” McAfee says.
The report predicts the 2011 trend of attacks targeting global corporations, government offices and financial hubs will grow further, as hactivists join forces with physical demonstrators. Meanwhile cybercriminals will even start attacking utility services-- with many industrial systems lacking necessary security measures.
The security vendor says that while spam volumes are down, legitimate advertise will start using the same spamming techniques (purchasing email lists or customer databases from companies going out of business) to create "legal" spam.
Mobile attacks will also grow (aiming particularly at mobile banking) while sophisticated hackers will target the "promised land" of embedded hardware through malware attacking the hardware layer inside embedded systems.
Finally, McAfee expects hackers to put more effort into hardware and firmware exploits-- even if vendors are baking new security features into OS cores.