Your identity up for grabs

Network World - Security was a big issue in 2011 with more sophisticated and a wider range of threats than ever before wasting even more of everyone's time at a cost of billions of dollars.

For example, there was March's hacking of RSA and its SecurID token system (sorry to bring this up again RSA, but it really was a big deal). This incursion reputedly wound up costing EMC, RSA's parent company, around $55 million. Even bigger than EMC's financial bath were rumors that the virtual raid was conducted by our friends in China so they could hack the likes of Lockheed Martin, a SecurID customer, to acquire sensitive military intelligence.

MORE: 2011's biggest security snafus

IN PICTURES: From Anonymous to Hackerazzi: The year in security mischief-making

Then in April, Epsilon, the largest permission-based email marketer in the world, was hacked and millions of email addresses belonging to companies such as Kroger, TiVo, US Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, Citi, Home Shopping Network, Brookstone, Walgreens, The College Board, Disney Destinations and Best Buy were stolen a huge wave of phishing attempts. The cost to Epsilon is unknown but must have been mind-bogglingly huge.

Also in April ... and then in May and June as well ... Sony's PlayStation, Qriocity and Sony Online networks were hacked and personal data, including some credit card numbers, of some 78 million members were swiped by, among others, the Lulz Security hacking group. Sony had to take down its services at a loss of more than $170 million.

Those are just a few of the ridiculous number of security issues we faced last year (see Network World's "2011's biggest security snafus" for a more comprehensive list of last year's security OMGs).

Here's the thing about security: What happened in 2011 was just more of what happened in 2010, which was just more of what happened in 2009, which was ...

Thus, I was able to prognosticate in my doom-laden Backspin 2012 Outlook column that this coming year we'll see "Botnets, malware, hackers, distributed DoS attacks, spam, phishing ... just more of the same junk we've dealt with for years but an order or two magnitude worse. Several large financial organizations will suffer serious hacker break-ins and the details of millions of consumer accounts will be exposed. Business will simply carry on as usual."

That, in a nutshell, is the problem: Complacency. Many businesses will simply belly up to the bar, pay the piper and carry on.

But this isn't just an issue for the huge enterprise like RSA, Epsilon, and Sony; it's a problem that's endemic in business in general, all the way from the biggest commercial behemoths at the top down to the smallest SME outfits.