Anonymous is 'nothing new', says Kaspersky researcher Says that waves of cyber attacks come in ten year cycles Source: The Inquirer (http://s.tt/19VVD)

HACKTIVIST COLLECTIVE Anonymous is "nothing new", a researcher at security vendor Kaspersky has somewhat controversially claimed. The vendor's senior security researcher, David Jacoby told The INQUIRER at the Information Security conference in London, "Anonymous says 'We are a legion - expect us', well it's expected. It's out there. It's crime." Jacoby also believes that waves of cyber attacks come in ten year cycles. "If you look in the 1990s we had people like Kevin Mitnick," Jacoby said. "Then we had the Masters of Deception that hacked into the NASA, and Mafiaboy was linked to all sorts of attacks against Ebay and Amazon. People wrote about it and talked about it and nothing really happened." He continued, "Every tenth year or so there are attackers, cyber crime increases and security companies figure out there's a problem. They work and work and the security level goes down, then there's a new group of attackers." Jacoby noted that, although it's nothing new, the major change in cyber attacks is that more people are participating in them. "It's becoming easy to do these cyber attacks - everyone can participate," he said. "It didn't used to be your average Joe, it was people with a much higher technical level. The attacks are the same but now more and more people are participating in it because they are having a more digital lifestyle." µ