The videos in “2020: The Series” present a speculative portrayal of life in the fictional country of “South Sylvania” in the year 2020. The goal of the series is to imagine a progression of possible what-ifs around security and privacy in the future. In the tradition of science fiction, the series looks to today and extrapolates trends forward into the future to paint this picture.
Every year, our Chief Technology Officer, Raimund Genes himself looks into the future to give us his personal predictions about what he believes he can see in the coming year such as his prediction last year of 1 million pieces of malware and high risk apps on the Android platform. As we come to the end of 2013 and the start of 2014, Raimund is again sharing his vision of the coming year with us in “Blurring Boundaries: Trend Micro Security Predictions for 2014 and Beyond.”
As Raimund looks ahead to 2014, his predictions show both a continued worsening of the threats we’re familiar with today as well as the early seeds of threats that can grow to those shown in 2020: The Series. Among the familiar threats he sees worsening are an increasing sophistication in attacks against mobile banking, mobile malware continuing to skyrocket and cross the 3 million mark for Android in 2014, and the expiration of support for Windows XP and Java 6 that together will create an unprecedented pool of vulnerable users for attackers. Trends presaging those shown in the videos include increased threats to the “Internet of Everything” (IoE), more and bigger data breaches, and law enforcement challenges with the “Deep Web”.
As always, the goals with Raimund’s predictions aren’t to scare but instead to draw attention to possible developments based on current trends to foster discussion and also drive Trend Micro’s (and others’) research forward to meet the emerging threats as quickly as possible.
