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.