The company recently acquired Vontu for $350 million to strengthen its presence in this space. Excerpts:
How does the acquisition of Vontu further your vision?
The acquisition of Vontu is another step forward in Symantec's vision for Security 2.0. Security is no longer just about the computer or even the corporate network. Instead, the new challenge is about protecting users' most important assets - their information and their interactions.
This is what we call "Security 2.0". Data loss among organisations contributed to 46 per cent of data breaches that occurred around the world. The acquisition is intended to integrate Vontu's market-leading Data Loss Prevention solutions with Symantec's broader portfolio.
How do you view India in this context?
India (along with China) has emerged as the growth engine in Asia-Pacific, accounting for 25 per cent of the world's trade volume.
With the explosive growth of mobile connections crossing the 200-million mark, the increased use of electronic devices for buying and selling, payments and transacting business on the Internet in India, IT administrators have begun to factor in safety and security aspects in their operational and storage machines.
According to a recent AC Nielsen survey, the use of the Internet by registered customers of online banking has shot up by 68 per cent during the current fiscal, in comparison to the last financial year.
At the same time, over 40 per cent of Indian computers are not even equipped with anti-virus programmes (CII-PwC survey). Cases of extortion, fraud and intellectual property theft occurred last year (2006) at one in every five-six Indian companies which is more than four times than the rest of the world.
Such vulnerability can blemish the reputation of the Indian outsourcing industry globally and hence the business is at constant risk. Symantec's vision is to safeguard the industry in this respect.
What do you predict will be some of the trends in the security industry in 2008?
Mobile platforms - interest in mobile security has never been higher. Banks along with eBay/PayPal are moving closer towards offering services available from mobile devices.
And now with Google planning to announce its phone, and with Apple's iPhone revolutionising the cellphone experience, it will be interesting to see how much access these provide to outside developers. Thus, as phones become more complex, more interesting and more connected, we expect attackers to take advantage.
Spam evolution - Symantec expects to see spam continuously evolve in order to evade traditional blocking systems and trick users into reading messages. One can expect to see an increase in the use of new attachment types such as mp3, flash and others.
Spammers will continue to focus on making content more appealing to readers, capitalising on highly visible current events such as presidential campaigns, the economy and popular fads.
Also, more spam is expected to be delivered via popular social networking sites. Another trend in spamming will be more targeted attacks that focus on compromising machines and system vulnerabilities with the intent of stealing personal information.
