The market

The market

Security providers are always busy. The latest field of activity: cloud computing.  Gartner’s report on “Market Trends: Security Markets, Worldwide, 2007-2013” demonstrates that the security market has always been very dynamic. However, it now seems to be skyrocketing. According to the latest semi-annual report by the security expert Websense, the number of websites with malware soared by 233 percent from January to June of this year. The increase was even 671 percent over a period of twelve months.

However, that is not because of the cloud: Spammers are increasingly attacking Web 2.0 sites that have a comment function. In individual cases, up to 95 percent of the comments in blogs, chat rooms and on message boards contain spam or malicious program code.

The most recent analysis by the security specialist Trend Micro gives little cause for optimism. The company investigated 100 million computers infested with malware and found that half of them had been infected for at least 300 days.

The experts from Panda Labs have listed the ten most dangerous threats to enterprise IT in 2011:

1.     More and more malware – in 2010 alone, 20 million new malicious codes were found.

2.      Cyber espionage and military hackers are heralding a new era in the Internet. Stuxnet and Wikileaks have marked a turning point in the history of cyber conflicts.

3.      Haktivism, i.e. the infiltration of organizations’ networks for political reasons.

4.      Social engineering – as is known, the riskiest weak point is always the person in front of the PC.

5.      Malware specifically for Windows 7.

6.      Viruses for mobile devices, in particular Android-based ones.

7.      That also includes tablets, whose use is growing.

8.      Apple systems are becoming increasingly vulnerable.

9.      Although HTML5 is not yet on the market, it is already seen as a perfect target for criminals, especially because no additional plug-ins, such as Flash Player, have to be used, and 

10.  Encrypted threats developed in such a way that they connect to a server and change their own code before they can be identified.

Although only a quarter of the computers investigated in this analysis on the basis of affected IP addresses were at enterprises, the actual percentage could be far higher. The experts base this assumption on the fact that an individual IP address in the enterprise usually stands for a gateway, which in turn is connected with numerous computers in the internal network. That means far more computers at the enterprise could be infected with malware.

According to the strategy consulting firm Booz & Company, around 37 billion euros in revenue were generated in the security market worldwide last year. In two years, that figure is expected to be up to 54 billion euros, corresponding to an average growth rate of 13.4 percent per annum.

Cloud computing has the potential to shrink this market again. Security from the cloud promises to enable a faster and more extensive response to threats more than conventional methods – to the chagrin of many of the above-mentioned security experts, but to the joy of users …