6 Trends for 2012: @McAfeeBusiness January #SecChat Recap

With the McAfee Labs’ 2012 predictions report as a guide, we started off this month’s #SecChat by crowdsourcing the question to our participants: what did the security community believe would be the most influential threats of 2012? We received a wide variety of speculations and well thought-out arguments, and we’ve collected what we hope is an accurate representation of the most buzzed-about topics of the hour:
1. Mobile & BYOD
Similar to what we reported in the McAfee whitepaper, many of you predicted that mobile threats would remain one of the most prominent vectors through 2012. But while nearly all of our 2011 sightings were concentrated on the Android platform, @rpermeh, @msarrel and others predicted that we are also due to see an increase in malware for iOS devices. In light of these increasing mobile threats, this presents a challenge for enterprises that have embraced BYOD policies. @hrbrmstr noted that organizations will struggle with increased demand for BYOD, but will continue to lack effective means to control and monitor the practice. @ChetWisniewski predicted that the mobile market would start to specialize, as did the market for desktop exploitations. While today’s attacks are for the most part opportunistic and interested in a quick monetary payoff, exploits will continue to evolve throughout 2012 to a focus on data theft.
2. Hacktivism
The threat of hacktivism (continue reading...)