The two most common questions I hear around this time of year are:what do you think the biggest trend of the year was and what do youthink the biggest threat next year will be. After outlining a year in review, let’s spend a little time on what we may expect to see in the next 12 months.

Obviously, the debut of a new operating system brings with it newfeatures for both the research community and malicious code authors toscrutinize. It’s simple to expect that we’ll see new attack attempts onMicrosoft Vista. What’s more interesting are trends we’re likely to seethat don’t even touch the physical hard drive of a computer. Web 2.0technologies have already begun to capture attacker interest andmotivation. As adoption continues to grow and dependence on these Webapplications increases, the impact and frequency of these issues willrise.

Consider the...

The countdown to December 31 has begun. As 2006 comes to a close, it’s important to review the significant trends and issues observed by Symantec Security Response over the past year. Some of these may relate to what we can expect to see in the New Year.

First and foremost, throughout 2006 we identified that online fraud has steadily increased and become even more sophisticated. Much of the online fraud activity we’ve seen has been in the form of phishing – approximately seven million total phishing attempts each day. That’s a lot of cybercriminals on the hunt for your personal information! We have also witnessed phishers innovating beyond the traditional online scam where they may distribute tens of thousands of emails hoping to trick one of you lucky individuals. Today, we are seeing fraudsters embrace new techniques such as vishing and SMishing to solicit and obtain your confidential information. See Zulfikar Ramzan’s blog...