IBM Names Top Trends, Risks

Tom Cross of IBM on the X-Force 2010 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report.Global security threats have reached record levels, and more than 4000 new security vulnerabilities were discovered in the first half of 2010.

These are among the headlines from IBM's new X-Force 2010 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report. In an exclusive interview, Tom Cross, manager of X-Force Advanced Research, discusses:

• Top headlines from the new report;
• Why phishing attacks are down;
• How organizations should respond to these results.

Cross is the manager of the IBM X-Force Advanced Research team. His team is engaged in a daily effort to identify, analyze, and mitigate computer security vulnerabilities. Cross has served as a vulnerability researcher and software developer. He is credited with discovering a number of critical security vulnerabilities in enterprise class software and he also wrote one of the first academic papers suggesting the use of trust metrics in Wikipedia. Cross frequently speaks on computer security issues at conferences around the world. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech.