Can data breaches be stopped, really? This was the question posed by Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, at the start of a panel discussion I attended at the RSA Conference last month. Experts on this panel seemed to agree on one answer – No.

The tongue-in-cheek response from James Christiansen, Evantix CEO and CISO, brought a room full of laughter when he said, “Yes, you just need to put the computer in a safe and bury it 30 feet underground.”

Jon Oltsik, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, equated the situation to the war on drugs, “Border control may be able to capture some on the borders, but the problem continues to escalate and keeps getting bigger.”   John Townsend, Manager of Information Protection and Security, DTE Energy commented, “If we use the wall analogy, rather than having a brick fence what we now have is a chain link fence. While we have made some inroads, people are still not taking security seriously enough.”

Internet connectivity is turning up in every product we see: phones, video game systems, video cameras, televisions, coffee machines, home lighting, vehicle alarms and soon refrigerators, ovens, and heck, maybe toilets.

What a great world it will be when my refrigerator sends me a text message or posts to my favourite social network that I need to buy milk and salami. It will be even better when I can log into my oven and tell it to turn on and cook a pot roast at 350 degrees for 4 hours so I come home to a great slow cooked meal, or when my oven contacts the fire department when it lights my house on fire. I’m sure over time this great technology will be adopted by supermarkets to manage their nationwide chains remotely to ensure proper temperatures are maintained in their coolers and freezers.

The first half of 2011 has seen cybercriminals making headlines and wreaking havoc with major data breaches. For IT folks, every day likely feels like a fight to protect your company’s valuable data and you may begin to wonder if this is a battle that the good guys can win. My take is yes we can. But to do so, requires being one step ahead of the criminal minds.

The latest news on the malicious attacks front involves W32.Qakbot. Even though this worm has been around since at least 2009, people and organizations continue to be affected by this threat on an ongoing basis. Why? Because the malware authors behind Qakbot are aggressively seeking means to push this threat to a wider number of victims.

During the past few months, there have been high levels of active development from the malware author’s side with the intent of circumventing detection techniques used by various security software.