GTISC interviewed a range of industry security experts to explore the and the available countermeasures. The five are malware, botnets, cyber warfare, threats to and devices, and the "evolving cyber crime economy."

In all five areas, attackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated, increasingly subtle, and increasingly adept at exploiting new Web developments, such as the rise of social network sites. Industry and government need to become equally concerted and sophisticated to contain these threats if the Internet is to be a trusted communications medium.(.)

The just-released report, "Emerging Cyber Threats Report for 2009: Mobility and Questions of Responsibility will Drive Cyber Threats in 2009 and Beyond," is .  (.)

development expertise is rapidly maturing, skills that are perfectly suited to exploit the continued weaknesses of poorly configured Web sites, especially social networking sites. The report cited Ryan Naraine, security evangelist for Kaspersky, as predicting a 10-fold increase in malware objects detected in 2008.

"As cyber criminals move beyond mass-distribution style phishing scams, they are learning how to localize and personalize their attacks for better penetration," according to the GTISC report. "Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and others will likely be used as delivery mechanisms to get unsuspecting users to a malicious Web site link in order to deliver malware."