14 DAY TRIAL // The security threat is sifting from the desktop toward electronic transactions. John Thompson, Chairman and CEO of Symantec Corp. revealed that the tendency, although not new, is accelerating.
"While a few years ago many people were much more focused on attacking the machine and attacking the broad-based activities that were going on online, now all of a sudden we've noticed a significant shift in both the type of attack and the motivation of the attack," Thompson said. "The attacks that we see today are more targeted and more silent and their objective is to create true financial harm as opposed to visibility for the attackers."
Thompson made this announcement at the Symantec Vision event in Tokyo, where the security company presented its Security 2.0 initiative designed to counter threats targeting electronic transactions.
"You're going to see more and more targeted criminal activity and more and more B-to-C type activity being intercepted and taken advantage of. It's just going to grow, we have no doubt about that," stated the head of Symantec's Asia Pacific business, Bill Robbins adding that the corporate environment will increase security expenditures to built databases of the users that are accessing electronic transactions. "From a hacker perspective if they get your credit card number from the biggest company in the world or the 48,000th biggest company in the world it's still the same value to them."