Αντιγράφω τις "προβλέψεις" για το 2007 από το WServerNews:

MICROSOFT: Like last year, MS is going to barrel along fine. They will continue to buy companies that have interesting technology, and try to fend off Oracle and Google. Getting in bed with Novell/SUSE will not bring them the benefits envisioned. Look for continued push in the enterprise, focusing even more on collaboration. Redmond will declare botnets as the '07 top Net threat, as the unlimited bandwidth of millions of zombies allows spammers to send hard-to-kill image-spam and serve as a vector for other malware.

OPERATING SYSTEMS: Vista will have a bull's eye painted on its back. Redmond's highly touted SDL (Security Development Lifecycle) will turn out to make Vista more secure, but not secure enough. There will be dozens of Vista vulnerabilities found during 2007, and Vista's default support for P2P protocols and IPv6 will facilitate the delivery of malicious payloads. Remember: OS upgrades break lots of things, so TEST, TEST, TEST! And if you can, this would be a good time to get rid of apps with OS-dependencies.

IT BUDGETS: To start with hiring, that will be slow in '07, so you will get lots of applicants for each opening. Flat IT budgets (no more than 6% up) means spending will be focused on projects that show true bottom-line value. Top 2007 IT skills companies are looking for: Programming/app development, Project management, IT/business analysis, Security, and Help Desk/Tech Support. No surprises here for the coming year.

MALWARE: Stand-alone, signature-based AV will die in '07. It's already smelling funny. Stand-alone antispyware products will need morph into a converged security client or they will die too in '07. Slapping a bunch of different agents together in a "suite" is going to be exposed as the quick-and-dirty resource hog it really is.

SMART MONEY: '07 is going to look a lot like 1999! Venture Capitalists are pouring cash into consumer-focused start-ups doing things like sharing photos and videos online and chatting with friends, hoping to do a 'YouTube' deal. Other areas that will break out in '07 are phone-over-internet; biotech companies, and 'green' energy start-ups.

HARDWARE: Virtualization was hot in '06 and will be smoking in '07, expect wars over standards and market leadership -- One Laptop Per Child will ship its $100 product, with a Linux Desktop -- Surveillance cameras will connect to facial recognition software, and IT will move into physical security -- Mid '07, 64-bit quad-core CPUs will ship standard for both desktop and server. With the new expansion slots, you will be able to buy a 32-way server for what you paid for a four-way server in '05. -- Certified Wireless USB will make major strides in '07, but lots of gadgets will come with Wi-Fi built-in!

NETWORK VULNERABILITIES: The two 'drivers' of testing networks for holes will be a) compliance and a realization that no pen-testing is really a major business risk. Bad guys will continue to ferret out and exploit existing holes, and will have "zero-day" exploits for 30-40% of announced patches. McAfee predicted that hackers are going to target MP3 files, so get those off your servers and workstations. Time to set a testing schedule/methodology and stick to it! Heads-up on Vista here; Lots of network monitoring tools cannot inspect Vista's IPv6 packets, making that a huge potential security hole. -- VoIP will be adopted massively, will be hacked and spam voice mail will show up.

MESSAGING SECURITY: ISPs are going to shut down both corporate and private users that allow spam to be sent from zombie PC's -- You will find some employees violating corporate policy and forward all their corporate email to gmail, since they get way more storage space there. Microsoft will urge you to give -each- employee 2Gig storage space -- 2007 will be the year you migrate away from stand-alone Exchange security tools to an integrated product that does it all -- A bug in the BlackBerry/Exchange middleware will be exploited and spread in 10 minutes through all email servers; and after you install Exchange 2007 you will create a smart phone/PDA policy.

2007 TECH TRENDS: Vista adoption will be slow and measured but steady. Plan to patch it every month just like older OSen. -- Google will continue to scoop up other content providers. -- TV delivered by the Net is going to really penetrate in 2007. Municipal Wi-Fi networks will continue to get rolled out throughout 2007 -- 'Web 2.0' was a bust, and people will say that the real future of the Net (Web 3.0) will turn our to be 3D virtual environments like "Second Life". -- More and more underground server bunkers will provide protection from intrusion and natural disasters.

WEB SECURITY: Cyber criminals will increase their bot networks -- Spear phishing will get even more targeted -- major players will get big time into 'behavioral marketing' (adware's 'ivy league sibling') -- blended malware will somewhat lower in volume, but become more virulent and hard to kill -- rootkits will proliferate but protection and remediation will increase too. Big companies spend a lot of money and are getting safer. Smaller outfits will feel the burn of attacks more in '07 than ever before. Identity Management will be the most important technology to both privacy and security compliance in 2007, but the bigger the organization, the harder it is to implement.

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