On the opening day of the BlackHat 2008 conference, Symantec did an anonymous survey of the attendees to discover exactly what they thought would be the hot security topics in the upcoming year.

While no one can predict the future, I found some of this fairly interesting.

The sample group consisted of IT managers, security researchers, and executives from several different industries and, of course, the government. The group surveyed could be considered International in nature, also. Experts from North America, Latin America and the Asia Pacific all voiced their opinions regarding what will become the hot security topics in the upcoming year.

Most surveyed seemed to believe that Web 2.0 and virtualization will be exploited frequently in the next year. In the post, I read about this by Zulfikar Ramzan, he mentions that Symantec has invested considerable resources in developing technology to prevent exploits in both these areas. He also mentions that Symantec is developing solutions to the increased dangers of what is known as drive-by pharming. In drive-by attacks, all a user has to do is visit a malicious site to be be infected.

Earlier this year, Zuftikar reported on one of the first sightings of drive-by pharming in the wild.

Another ongoing concern, especially with crimeservers being found in the wild with gigabytes of personal and financial information is the ongoing issue of data theft. Data theft is and will probably be the primary motive for most of the exploits out there. On a personal level, what scares me is the increasing sophistication of the attacks and the ever increasing amount of information compromised.

The respondents in the survey believe that most data will be stolen via insufficient access controls, laptops gone missing, data sent to third parties, and data being wrongfully posted to the Internet, intranet, and extranet.

Another new solution mentioned by the respondents is whitelisting. In simple terms, whitelisting is where a system is protected by only allowing approved sources to integrate with it. If a file or application isn't approved by the whitelist, it simply will not run.

Having worked around financial crimes for a number of years, I noticed they seemed to be on the rise. One reason for this is technology, which grows more rapidly than laws designed to protect us from it. Although the blog is a resource to educate people on identity theft, it also strives to educate the common person on the rapidly growing problem of crimes enabled (made too easy) by technology and the Internet.

Keep reading for information and comments on this article, and add some feedback of your own!

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