As we stand here in the middle of 2006, it’s already become a little tired to mention the shift in the threat landscape from the digital graffiti of the past to the outright criminal pursuits that dominate the industry today. The dramatic impact of this shift has left a dense fog in its wake—hanging over the industry—obscuring other important changes that have taken place during the same timeframe. Some of the more interesting trends have been specifically related to the concept of “Web 2.0”: the new genre of Web technologies and models that have emerged, like a phoenix, from the ashes of the dotcom meltdown. Let’s take a look at a few Web 2.0 trends and see what impact they have on security.

User-created content
Blogs are first to leap to mind here, but there are certainly other notable areas where the content creation responsibilities have shifted from the traditional publisher into the hands of the people. Check out the spate of new online video...

I think that it goes without saying that Windows Vista is one of the most important technologies that we will see in the next year. With current versions of Windows appearing on well over 90% of desktop systems, Vista will undoubtedly become the dominant operating system within a few years. The appearance of Windows Vista gives Symantec an interesting opportunity to both perform new research, and to publish the findings of that research. First of all, Vista is a beta operating system, meaning that it is changing at an extremely rapid pace; bugs are getting fixed, and in some cases new ones are introduced. Second, there is more freedom to discuss it because it is being made available explicitly for this purpose (to undergo testing and scrutiny).

With that said, I am very happy to present the Symantec Advanced Threat Research team’s first publicly available research paper: Windows...