After witnessing large companies succumb to targeted data breach attacks that not only stained reputations, but also caused them significant collateral damage, Trend Micro wrapped 2011 as ‘The Year of Data Breaches’ in its annual threat roundup report.

Having spent much of the year battling data breaches that led to huge information and financial loss, the security industry was likely relieved to see 2011 come to a close, a statement from the company said.

Authored by Trend Micro threat researchers, this year's report revisits past predictions, and summarises notable threat incidents and security wins throughout 2011.

The mobile threat landscape reached new levels of maturity in 2011. The company’s researchers tracked a staggering spike in the volume of mobile malware, especially those targeting the Android platform. RuFraud and DroidDreamLight - two of the most notorious Android malware variants - took much of the spotlight, causing millions of users lost data and money.

2011 was a profitable year for social media threats, spammers and scammers who leveraged the trending topics of social networking sites to improve upon their social engineering and hacking tactics, stealing the data of millions of social networkers worldwide. Consequently, regulators have started demanding that social networking sites implement policies and mechanisms to protect the privacy of their users.

While the number of publicly reported vulnerabilities decreased from 4,651 in 2010 to 4,155 in 2011, exploit attacks evolved with higher complexity and sophistication, the statement said.

Attacks in 2011 were targeted, original, and well controlled, the most notable of which set their sights on CVE-2011-3402, CVE-2011-3544, and CVE-2011-3414, along with a couple of Adobe product zero-day vulnerabilities that were exploited in the wild, it said.

Finally, despite an aggressive cybercriminal landscape, Trend Micro, along with its industry partners and law enforcement authorities achieved some remarkable and strategic wins this year. Operation Ghost Click reached success after five years of stealth tracking and working closely with the FBI.

The company was the only one that was involved, and was able to assist the FBI in what was noted as the biggest cybercriminal takedown in history, the statement said.

“Our work is never done. With 3.5 new threats created every second, and as businesses and consumers take the journey to the cloud, the risk of data and financial loss are greater than ever,' said Raimund Genes, CTO, Trend Micro.

'As a company (and as an industry), we must continue to evolve and create better, data-centric security products for the post-PC era where users need greater visibility and assurance into who is accessing their data, when, where and how,' he said. - TradeArabia News Service