On Mitigation of Modern Cybercrime Threats

As the infrastructure that humans heavily rely upon grows increasingly dependent on modern technology and the Internet, the damage that can be done by exploiting vulnerabilities in these systems becomes more significant and worrisome. The extent of these threats’ possible impact cannot be overstated, as the amount of sensitive information stored in information systems and the actions that they are permitted to perform has been continuously heightening since the beginning of the information age. We present a review of representative examples of security incidents that had put a large number of such systems at risk of abuse, with many of them having withstood documented exploitation “in the wild”. We analyze the circumstances that lead to the presence of these security threats, as well as the way they were handled in terms of disclosure and urgent fixes to affected software. Finally, we also suggest methods that, if they had been applied timely, could have possibly prevented these vulnerabilities from existing in the first place, or lowered their attack surface.