Top 10 trends in Information Security for 2009

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Rana Gupta, Director, India and SAARC, SafeNet, puts forward the top 10 trends in information security, for 2009

1) Data Breaches:  There is an increase in the deployment of encryption technologies in order to protect sensitive data. In fact, there is a decreased security breaches via encryption solutions and this trend will continue in 2009 as well.

The economic melt down will lead to increasing incidents of data breaches though corporate will be clueless of this happening in most cases even so they will be reluctant to admit this in public even if they do detect/find such data breaches due to lack of any strong compliance acts in India

2) Increasing web threats: As the number of available web services increases and as browsers continue to converge on a uniform interpretation standard for scripting languages, such as JavaScript, it is expected that the number of new Web-based threats to continue to increase.

3) Bot can be a threat: In the near future bots will further diversify and evolve in their behavior. This might lead to increase in the hosting of more phishing sites. Bots can perpetrate a wide variety of malicious activity.

4) Protection of mainframe environment: With the continued growth of security threats and increase in government regulations and industry standards, such as PCI, it is more important than ever for enterprises to safeguard critical data that sits in mainframe environments to protect themselves against security breaches and hefty non-compliance fines.

5) Information is critical: off late people have realized that information is more valuable than ever.  Companies and institutions will be taking concrete majors to protect the information. So, it is expected that the industry will witness the increase in the user of single sign-on and authentication for users.

6) Hacking becomes profession: Hacking has become a criminal profession. It is no more a hobby. More and more attacks are undertaken in an organized manner and led by criminals with bad motives.  Extortion related to denial-of-service attacks and phishing are two examples of criminal attacks.  It is very important to address this issue.

7) Stronger mobile platforms: With the increase in mobile workforce and availability of more complex handsets (with lot of applications on it), the interest in mobile security will be higher. In the days to come anti-virus software for Mobile Phones will become a necessity and the industry will start to seek solutions to do away with spam through SMS.

8) Virtualization a gateway to threat: From a security perspective, the spread of virtualization is causing serious threats and the impact of the same in the enterprise space is quite evident. But one can not live without virtualization. That's why it will be observed that more and more enterprises will be opting for stringent security majors as far as virtualization is concerned.

9) More complex less secured: As systems are getting more complex, they are getting less secure. And more and more use of Internet is making the infrastructure more complex. Advances in security technology simply have not kept pace with the Internet's growth.  Security is getting better, but complexity is getting worse faster. It is expected that this trend will continue in 2009 as well. CIO/CSOs will continue to seek ways to protect data through out their lifecycle but will find that nothing fits their complex needs and at the end of the day their data will continue to remain as vulnerable as ever

10) Role of encryption:  The more practical CIOs will be quick to realize that there is no silver bullet to take care of all their data-protection needs and deploy Disk Encryption solutions along with Pre-Boot Authentication to secure the data in the wake of physical theft of laptops or hard-disks.