From the Editors:
We've challenged our expert contributors to foretell what 2004 has in store for infosecurity. Without hesitation, they offered their mostly-stoic conjectures. Read what all of our experts had to say, and let us know what you foresee in 2004.
ED YAKABOVICZ
Ed is the Information Security Officer for Bank One's Corporate Internet Group. He has more than 20 years of experience solving complicated business problems related to security, IT and project management. His strengths include understanding company IT infrastructures at both the technical and managerial levels, thus understanding and resolving issues that plague both worlds. As a contributing expert on SearchSecurity, Ed answers your questions on securing an enterprise IT infrastructure and network. Send Ed your questions or comments on his predictions via our Ask the Expert feature.
2004 holds many new and exciting threats:
Down at the Microsoft farm it will be business as usual with the release of code that is NOT tested or secured. XP will be served up to the hackers as Windows 2000 was in 2003 with many threats on the horizon. Weaknesses in .NET, Server 2003 and many other Windows products will continue to plague our networks.
Hybrid malicious code will be grow like weeds in popular systems as intelligent hackers implement what they learned in 2003. Our hardware will become as smart as our software in detecting and stopping these threats. The layer 2 switch and IDS will become more mature in the IPS realm and beyond. Hybrid threats will drive the need for hybrid systems for protection.
The U.S. Government has started and will continue to create and update laws to protect our systems and prosecute computer crime. Homeland Security will continue to do a mediocre job due to the CIA and FBI fighting the political battle and not working as a team, with Congress supporting everyone.
Finally, malicious code, poorly written software, management not
understanding the needs of security staff or security measures, and
overworked information technology staff will continue to keep our systems poorly protected and virus infected. Happy New Year!
