Predicting the future: 2008

Let me start with a disclaimer: I personally believe that anybody that predicts any technology with any specific detail more than a few months into the future either don’t care about being very wrong or just don’t know enough to know better.

So, I am going to try and predict the future of computer security for the next year. My track record with predicting the future has been very bad, so don’t be too surprised if I am totally wrong.

I think some of the changes in the threats we will be seeing in 2008 will be:

Better organized cybercrime
More targeted attacks against social networks
More hacking/code/cache injection of popular web sites
More search engine and DNS injection/pollution attacks
More product exploits, especially against security products and common third party products
Malware that changes even more rapidly, and in more complex ways than they have been in 2007
More rootkits and file infectors


I think mass-mailing worms have become less effective, but targeted or boutique malware is something we will see a significantly higher number of instances. We should see extra effort on using social engineering techniques. We will also see new ways of introducing adware and other types of risks into computers.

I think we will see a significant increases in the number of cases where the PDF format will be abused/used to distribute adware, malware or targeted malware.

We will exceed the 1 million signatures mark in our database sometime early next year. I also predict that around the middle of next year we will be processing 1 TB of malware samples a month. I also predict that we will be seeing around 15 TB of SPAM next year.