Future Trends

Specific future trends, in the opinion of the author, are:

·         Exponential increases in user sophistication;

·         Exponential increases in access to computers and the Internet;

·         Electronic commerce based crime will increase;

·         Low value / high volume transaction scams will increase;

·         Pornography of all flavours will continue to be readily available;

·         Loss of control of identity, at the individual, corporate and, potentially, government level will create difficulties for both law enforcement and revenue agencies and the corporate world;

·         Borderless 'supra-national' crime will increase;

·         ISP fraud / intrusion will increase;

·         Identity theft will be massively increased from an estimated $8.75 billion in losses during 2002;

·         20% of enterprises will experience a serious Internet security incident Cleanup costs will exceed the prevention costs by 50%;

·         90% of cyber-attacks will exploit known security flaws for which a patch is available or a solution known;

·         Worm-driven DDoS will appear;

·         Increased critical infrastructure attacks;

·         Intruder tools will become more sophisticated. Many of them are 'point and go' that can be used by people with little technical skill. Many of the attack tools are designed to support large scale attacks such as seen recently with the distributed denial of service attacks of 2002.