Will the credit crunch really affect IT security?

So the financial crisis has supplanted compliance, green IT and all the other buzz words peppering vendor press releases in recent years, but are the security implications of it really that serious? Well, yes and no.

The obvious one to watch out for is phishing. As has been noted by Trend Micro and others, the disruption in commerce - with firms being bought, sold and merging - creates great opportunities for the hackers to harvest personal log-in and other details. A phishing email for example could be sent out to customers of an ailing bank, saying that the institution in question is going to be sold and needs to reconfirm all of its customers' details.

Then there is that other byproduct of an economic downturn, people are going to lose their jobs. But we're still skeptical about the predictions of Kaspersky Lab, Trend and others that this is really going to turn unemployed software engineers to the dark side. Alright, it might make one or two think twice about where their loyalties should lie, but it would be a stretch to see it severely unbalancing the delicately weighted good versus bad battle between hackers and anti-malware writers.

What's more likely is that witless people in search of some extra money to get them through these hard times are conned into becoming money mules and other members of the online fraud chain.