It seems my crystal ball gazing powers are increasing this year. A few weeks ago I reported how, far from diminishing as a threat to enterprises, Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attacks would provide an ever-greater threat to firms' online presence. Well, they were actually the predictions of DDOS prevention specialist Prolexic, but they seem to be ringing true here at IT Week. Any of you who are regular visitors may have noticed problems accessing the home page….the reason, apparently, is a DOS attack, with spammers trying to overload our systems by repeatedly creating trackbacks. Now I'm not privy to exactly how IT is dealing with this problem, but it hopefully has something up its sleeve. Literally tens of people will be bereft of their favourite IT news site…and as we all know, consumers are a fickle bunch.

On another, but similarly security-related note, all the news wires are a-buzz about yet another potential threat to firms and consumers, or yet another excuse for a terrible moniker – drive-by-pharming. No, this isn't the threat to corporate headquarters from disgruntled agricultural workers, but more mundanely, wi-fi routers. Once they've found a wi-fi connection which hasn't been protected adequately – ie with more than the password it came out of the box with – these ne'erdowells can apparently reconfigure said router's DNS settings so that when an innocent user tries to visit their banking site, say, the crims can direct them to a fictitious look-a-likey page and mine their personal details. Just a problem for consumers and small businesses you might think? Not according to McAfee's Greg Day, who thinks that the ad-hoc buying of wi-fi kit in enterprises can also put them in danger.