in the wake of rising threats it is important for everyone to be geared with new cyber challenges that would arise in the new year jagdish mahapatra managing director mcafee india and saarc tells us more about mcafees top 10 enterprise security predictions for 2013 1 targeted attacks 2012 saw an increased growth in targeted attacks that proved successful in disrupting service and fraudulently obtaining significant amounts of intellectual property we expect cyber criminals will continue to use this method and as a result in 2013 we are likely to see significantly more targeted attacks and targeted malware this type of attack is more difficult to protect against uniform attacks are still out there but as soon as they are identified and a security fix is released they are no longer effectiveone disturbing development in this trend across 2012 was that we started to see more targeted attacks that also destroyed evidence of the attack afterwards and we are likely to see this continue we have seen attacks where 30000 hard drives were left nonoperational after an attack dealing with the cleanup distracts the it administrators who dont immediately realize they have been hacked it also adds to the difficulty in ensuring effective incident response as hackers literally attack any hardware on the way out protecting against this will be a major challenge particularly for enterprise and government 2 signed malware signed malware was prevalent in 2012 and this is likely to continue signed malware is present when a hacker obtains a digital certificate from an organization and appends it to malware allowing the malware to pass through an organizations operating system stuxnet is a high profile example of this threat there will be a large increase in this type of threat and it will be harder to stop because it appears more legitimate 3 big business at risk enterprises can be at a higher risk of an attack as there is often a greater attack surface and more visibility gaps in their security posture with targeted attacks on the rise the motives to target a large enterprise are often greater than a smaller organisation 4 nonwindows attacks we suspect nonwindows attacks will continue to increase in 2013 android devices are now the highest selling mobile devices in the asia pacific market and hackers will take advantage of that by developing mobile malware consumers arent the only ones at risk of mobile threats enterprises particularly those embracing bring your own device byod are also at risk interestingly the mobile malware growth rate is similar to what we saw for windows malware some time ago which shows it is a genuine threat mcafees q3 threat report for 2012 showed mobile malware almost doubled when compared to the previous quarters numbers 5 ransomware this will also be prevalent in 2013 ransomware is operated by encrypting files on a victims computer which can only be unlocked by paying the criminals a fine it has been a big issue in other countries around