Early on, malware was more of a nuisance than a threat, both in the amount of malware that was released into the Internet and the technical capability of the malware itself. In terms of numbers, today’s figures from security researchers indicate that there are approximately 1.6 million new variants of malware released into the Internet each day compared to hundreds of variants released daily in the ‘90s.

Every second there are close to 18 new malware variants released that have the potential to attack consumers and businesses. Each variant represents a change from a type of malware that has already been identified. This change may mean that traditional detection mechanisms such as antivirus software will not be able to identify it as malware, and therefore will not provide adequate defense against it. Most people accept that antivirus software is at best 30 percent effective.  Note that this doesn’t mean you don’t need antivirus software, only that you need more than just antivirus software.

A second major change to the threat landscape is particularly challenging to the hospitality industry. This change results from the widespread usage of social networks coupled with an increasing level of sophistication of social engineering attacks and an increase in mobile technologies. Due to the dependency of the hospitality industry on social networks and mobile technologies, these trends result in a perfect storm for the industry.

In recent years, social networking has grown at such a rate that it now has as many users as the population of some small countries. This fact alone puts a bull’s-eye on social networks for cybercriminals. Where there are a lot of people there is a lot of opportunity for the collection of reconnaissance data that can be used to conduct attacks. Keeping malware off of social networks is a tremendous challenge and even the best run social networks struggle with this. Currently Twitter has been identified as having the highest percentage of malware of all the social networks.

It is easy to see how social engineering has blossomed with the rise of social networks. Even if your target is not on a social network, someone has friended them and a path to finding information that can be used to compromise them has been created. Who doesn’t use social networks to keep up with what their children and grandchildren are doing? Cybercriminals know this is fertile ground; find a relative or friend of a target and somewhere along the chain you will find someone who does not have adequate security settings providing a way in. In this way targeted attacks on executives have increased in the past couple of years, as the cybercriminal looks to find information about them from their children or from their assistants’ social media accounts.

These trends emphasize the increasing importance of security education for consumers and for businesses. You need more than just antivirus software on your PC to protect yourself. You need antivirus software on your smartphones and other mobile devices, security settings invoked on social media sites, and awareness training that helps to keep you vigilant in the protection of your customer data.