New technologies are changing the way we communicate. Businesses are sharing information across extended enterprises and engaging in more complex electronic interactions.

These same technologies are also introducing new security risks. No longer are threats focused just on the device; now they are targeting information and interactions. Phishing, identity theft, malicious users, and cybercriminals are all risks enterprises face. What’s more, businesses must also comply with a growing range of industry and government regulations aimed at information protection.

As a result, organizations must keep threats out while ensuring that information is kept safely inside. While antivirus, antispyware, and other standalone protection measures were sufficient to protect organizations in the past, businesses now need more comprehensive, proactive, integrated, and manageable security measures aimed at helping safeguard endpoints -- and, in turn, the entire enterprise IT infrastructure -- from both internal and external threats.

Wild, Wild Web

A look at the most recent Internet Security Threat Report from Symantec Corp. paints a compelling picture of the need for next-generation protection. Today’s attacks are not only stealthy, targeted, and financially motivated but they also leverage surprisingly sophisticated attack toolkits that make hacking easier and more lucrative.

In fact, the underground digital economy has become a multi-billion dollar criminal industry -- the de facto trading place for illicit information and a shopper’s paradise for hackers who want to purchase professionally developed tools that can be used right out of the box to launch and sustain multi-staged attacks.

The targeted, professional nature of these attacks and the robust nature of the tools with which they are launched highlight the difficulties of protecting against such attacks. As security measures are developed and implemented to protect the computers of end users and organizations, attackers just as quickly adapt new techniques and strategies to circumvent them.

Not only have hacker tools evolved, but attack methods have now converged and attacks are launched in stages. As Internet attacks, vulnerabilities, malicious code and other malicious activities have become more interconnected and cross-functional, attackers are able to optimize the capabilities of a broader spectrum of attack methods. Worse yet, staged downloaders have become the tactic of choice, enabling attackers to launch an initial, low-profile compromise to establish a beachhead from which to launch subsequent attacks that are designed to try different methods for obtaining unauthorized, confidential information.