• Increase in phishing attacks that impersonate social networking sites and mail parcel services: The volume of email attributed to phishing was relatively small over the course of 2010 and the first half of 2011, but phishing came back with a vengeance in the second half, reaching volumes that haven't been seen since 2008. Many of these emails impersonate popular social networking sites and mail parcel services, and entice victims to click on links to Web pages that may try to infect their PCs with malware. Some of this activity can also be attributed to advertising click fraud, where spammers use misleading emails to drive traffic to retail websites.

• Publicly released mobile exploits up 19% in 2011: This year's IBM X-Force report focused on a number of emerging trends and best practices to manage the growing trend of "bring your own device," or BYOD, in the enterprise. IBM X-Force reported a 19% increase over the prior year in the number of exploits publicly released that can be used to target mobile devices.

• presents new challenges: In 2011, there were many high-profile cloud breaches affecting well-known organizations and large populations of their customers. IT security staff should carefully consider which workloads are sent to third-party cloud providers and what should be kept in-house due to the sensitivity of data, IBM said. The IBM X-Force report notes that the most effective means for managing security in the cloud may be through Service Level Agreements (SLAs) because of the limited impact that an organization can realistically exercise over the cloud computing service. Therefore, careful consideration should be given to ownership, access management, governance and termination when crafting SLAs, IBM stated.

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