Threats of the future

A futurologist predicts new threats to evolve over the coming decades.

In his report "Life and how we'll live it -- Predicting cloud computing's role in a changing society", futurologist Ian Pearson describes several new kinds of threats IT security professionals may face in the years ahead. The study, commissioned by Fujitsu, sees an escalation of the battle to protect data:

"Soon, tiny specks of smart dust dropped through ventilation grills on office equipment will allow interception of data before it even gets to an encryption device, picked up later by a wireless memory stick in someone’s pocket. Slightly cleverer smart dust could even allow documents to be subtly altered while they are being printed. Detection of such devices might prove difficult.

New techniques [for creating malware] will arise... With tiny fragments only becoming a whole at the point of execution, detection will become harder.

Other means of attack, such as network resonance, might rely on the physical properties of a system such as the time taken for signals to get from one point to another... Attacks based on correlated traffic and information waves will also become possible...

The web will soon become the default choice for organizing political campaigns, or even electronic boycotts of particular companies too, making the security challenge even tougher.

Security, in other words, is going to become one of the key motivations for outsourcing IT – because it is unlikely that any one company will be able to handle all these emerging threats if it stands alone."

Source: Fujitsu.