Happy New Year to everyone, and all the best to all of you and your families in 2010. 2009 has been a busy year of ups and downs in the Infosec community and I am sure we will all have more fun and frolics as we roll into 2010.

With this in mind I thought I would share some predictions for 2010 as I look into my Security Crystal Ball 🙂 Its all very mystic meg I know…

• The buzz that is cloud security will continue to grow, and as more organisations look to realise the possible savings we find out how some of the early adopters didn’t do security right.
• Increased focus on compliance and regulation. Organisations failing to meet PCI:DSS compliance to be met with stricter penalties, I think we are going to see more action less talk. The Information Commissioner and his team are going to be more proactive with identifying organisation not meeting their data protection obligations. Finally the FSA’s new task force are going to uncover more insecure goings on in the financial institutions as they start lifting the carpets to find whats been swept under there for years.
• With increasing threats from various governments to impose restrictions on Internet access, and deep packet inspection, the growth in knowledge and usage of darknets will increase.
• Continued adoption of full disk, endpoint encryption technologies and data loss prevention solutions as organisations attempt to get more control of their data and where it flows.
• Increased disclosure laws in Europe. I have said this before but I think as the consumer becomes more aware about the regulations that exist, pressure is going to come to have a better understanding of breaches and data loss, similar to what exists in the US.
• People will continue to do things insecurely, so called hackers will break things, get caught and claim some form of illness, the fairies made me do it.
• Increased security awareness around the use and adoption of social networking sites. This may lead to more organisations restricting the usage, and hopefully increased consumer awareness to share less information.
• Windows 7 to be bashed about increasing number of found security vulnerabilities, and the time taken to patch.
• Increasing PDF related security issues and Adobe fail. Exploit writers will become more creative and not rely on the simple Java stuff.
• A slight growth in awareness of security threats to mobile platforms. I don’t think we are going to suddenly see loads of exploits targeted as mobiles as I still don’t think the value is there, but there will be some more talk and research as we continue to rely and do more whilst mobile.
• More exploits targeting virtualised environments. I think there is going to be a greater push for virtulisation in 2010, Googles OS is a perfect example, so researchers will start looking at this more.

So basically alot of the same really 🙂 I am sure if I could think of more, but its all just guessing really, no one really knows for sure.

What does 2010 hold for me, well……. I am looking forward to some great interviews we have coming up on the Eurotrash Security Podcast, I will also hopefully be setting up a couple of UK based Security Bloggers Meet Ups in 2010, and I also hopefully have some reviews of the IronKey S200 Personal and Enterprise coming in Jan, along with DESLock.

I am hoping for a year of more Infosec challenges and learning opportunities to fuel my passion for the industry. Also time and funds available I am looking forward to seeing more of my Infosec buddies and conferences, and meeting new people also. Oh and I also still need to work out to use my new Mac properly, its a learning curve 🙂

So all the best to all of you, and I hope 2010 brings you more ups than downs.

Dale