"Vendors need to broaden their portfolio and vision to provide end-to-end solutions which are aligned to customers' business needs and are easy to manage," said Chandrasekaran. "We also expect intellectual property protection to continue to remain a challenge in Asia-Pacific."

Problems at the root

"Another very specific security issue which has emerged as a top-of-mind problem in corporate network security is the rootkit," said Sophos's Ducklin. "A rootkit is a piece of malicious code which serves to disguise or to "stealth" the presence of other malicious programs on a computer. The idea is that malware which incorporates a rootkit is likely to evade notice for much longer than malware which can be detected by conventional tools."

The rootkit-level received wide media attention in late 2005 when entertainment conglomerate Sony BMG Music Entertainment included a piece of rootkit-level code it called "XCP content protection software" on its music CDs was exposed (the company ceased production of XCP-enabled CDs and promised a recall after malicious 'Trojan horse' programs were written that exploited the XCP code). "Despite being a much-talked about problem, rootkits aren't well-understood," said Ducklin, "probably because they are technically complex and work at a very low level, often inside the operating system kernel itself."

Ducklin said that his firm has Sophos recently released a free tool, Sophos Anti-Rootkit," for the Windows platform. The will also discover and remove the Sony BMG rootkit, according to Sophos.