What To Expect In Security In 2010

It used to be that end-of-year security predictions were bold and almost science-fictiony. They have become more conservative this year and therefore more reasonable. I've been barraged with them and have attempted to collect the best here.It's clear to me and many others that the major security development of 2009 was the emergence of rogue security software, a.k.a. "scareware," as the biggest problem out there for most users. Rogues have been around for years, but their escalation in 2009 was palpable. Many of the 2010 predictions have to do with where rogues go next, and this is a reasonable line of speculation. Rogues are about making money more directly than prior forms of malware, and the predictions deal with how they plan to do that.Security vendor Fortinet predicts expansion of some of the 2009 rogueware trends: affiliate networks and ransomware. We have reported recently on rogueware that encrypts your files and demands money for a decryption key. They also foresee increased sophistication of rogueware business models, including expanded affiliate networks, although these were news over a year ago.Symantec has been moving for a while in the direction of relying on reputation as a major factor in determining the security of files and other data, and this factor leads the predictions for 2010 from MessageLabs, Symantec's secure e-mail hosting service. For large (continue reading...)