Spammers are shifting their focus to targeted attacks via social networks

Instead of sending heavy spam traffic cyber crooks now use targeted attacks via social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, according to the report made by Cisco security executive Tom Grills.

"2010 was the first year spam volumes went down," Gillis said during an onstage interview at DEMO Spring 2011. "Does that mean spam is less of a problem? No."

Now spammers view Facebook and other social networking websites as more effective tool to launch attacks targeted at certain companies or people.

Recently Cisco tracked attacks launch through the website of LinkedIn where fake profiles were used to send connection requests that appear legitimate yet are used to install malware on a machine. These attacks can be launched against specific companies in an attempt to steal financial information.

With e-mail spam, it's not uncommon for 2 billion messages to be sent in a single attack, Gillis said. But spammers, in some cases, are now abandoning those types of attacks for the targeted ones using social networks that Gillis described. On Facebook, worms such as Koobface demonstrate this threat.

Separately, Cisco's Gillis said that security must continue to adapt to both social networks and the proliferation of mobile devices. Within five years, mobile devices could be the primary tool used to access enterprise information, he said.

Personal and business data is being mingled, and virtualization is freeing applications from the binds of the hardware running underneath, he said.

Eventually, "security will be decoupled from the physical infrastructure," he said. Better models of authentication will be crucial. "The reason we have these problems is we don't know you are who you're saying you are," Gillis said.