5 IT Security Breakthroughs Promise to Thwart Threats

For the past 25 years, a war has waged between malicious programmers and the researchers trying to make computing safe for the enterprise. The battle has shown no signs of subsiding once a new countermeasure is deployed, the hackers find new ways to make IT worried.

"Almost all malicious software comes from the Web, but the Web is becoming much more transactional," says Gartner analyst Peter Firstbrook, referring to corporate America's growing reliance on Web sites like Salesforce.com to conduct business. Yet, he says that as many as 60 percent of all publicly accessible Websites are infected with malware. That means the enterprise needs to deploy ever-more-intelligent systems to combat these threats.

Meanwhile, the world's top security labs such as those operated by Symantec, VeriSign, McAfee, Kaspersky and Kindsight are working on innovative countermeasures that will soon make their way to the gateway appliances used in data centers, and none too soon. Read on to learn about five approaches security experts are taking to help beat the bad guys.

For the past 25 years, a war has waged between malicious programmers and the researchers trying to make computing safe for the enterprise. The battle has shown no signs of subsiding once a new countermeasure is deployed, the hackers find new ways to make IT worried.

"Almost all malicious software comes from the Web, but the Web is becoming much more transactional," says Gartner analyst Peter Firstbrook, referring to corporate America's growing reliance on Web sites like Salesforce.com to conduct business. Yet, he says that as many as 60 percent of all publicly accessible Websites are infected with malware. That means the enterprise needs to deploy ever-more-intelligent systems to combat these threats.

Meanwhile, the world's top security labs such as those operated by Symantec, VeriSign, McAfee, Kaspersky and Kindsight are working on innovative countermeasures that will soon make their way to the gateway appliances used in data centers, and none too soon. Read on to learn about five approaches security experts are taking to help beat the bad guys.

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