Latest edition of the McAfee content packed Sage Report
McAfee announced the release of the second issue of Sage (PDF, cca 1.6 mb), a semi-annual security journal designed to inform security executives and technical personnel on cutting-edge topics to help them make better informed security decisions.
Sage examines the near-term future of the security business — the threats, defenses and issues security professionals will face over the next five years.
* The Future of Cybercrime: Cybercrime follows money. Today, the majority of cybercriminals target PC users, but experts expect more attackers to branch out to other areas of technology, like voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and radio frequency identifications (RFID), as those technologies become more widely adopted.
* Securing Applications: Securing applications is a continual race between malware writers and developers, and the developers are struggling to keep up. As more information surfaces about the nature of software bugs and how they might be exploited, hackers are finding vulnerabilities that were previously considered to be secure.
* The Future of Security, Vista Edition: While Microsoft has taken steps to make the base of Microsoft Windows Vista more secure, the improvements weaken third-party efforts to secure systems and don’t go far enough to do the job alone.
* Spyware Grows Up: Although programmers add security measures during development, new spyware technology often surpasses even the best planning of the most diligent engineers. Spyware will follow us into new technologies, like Bluetooth and RFID.
* Emails Spam Plague Persists: While McAfee expects to see little increase in the percentage of spam volume over the next two years, the total volume of spam is expected to increase as worldwide bandwidth grows. Image spam is the latest way for spam writers to dodge defenses.
* Online Crime Migrates to Mobile Phones: While current mobile phone service is generally considered safe, McAfee is seeing a rapid growth in mobile attacks with increasingly technical diversification.
* Closing the Data Leakage Tap: Data Leakage is an emerging security concern which can bear an enormous impact on the reputation of a business. While drive encryption is the only reasonably mature preventative technology, McAfee expects that basic data leakage prevention and disk encryption will become ubiquitous in regulated enterprises within the next five years.
* Managing Risk: Security risk management is an important issue for IT managers. Organizations that fail to be proactive in risk management will find that the businesses they are chartered with protecting will sail on without them.