While you've been busy outfitting your network with the latest and greatest firewalls, encryption, intrusion detection, and intrusion prevention tools, hackers have been busy as well — inventing new ways to compromise your network and exploit the valuable resources of your enterprise.

If this fact seems frightening, it should. The price of network security is eternal vigilance, and as network technologists it's our job to stay on top of the state of the art in network vulnerabilities. Fortunately, just knowing about these new exposures gives you a leg up on prevention.

Most of the new vulnerabilities are side effects from such innovative technologies as virtualization, wireless networking, enhanced operating systems, and the new IP routing protocol IPv6. However, one significant new threat is an old enemy in new clothes — social engineering: the art of obtaining proprietary information by personal deception. Hackers have changed social engineering into an assembly-line business, automating the selection and priming of targets, then moving in for the kill with seasoned professional impersonators that play on our sense of "correctness" to ultimately penetrate security barriers.

As you learn about these nascent exploits, you should be thinking how they could affect your current security infrastructure, which dictates how quickly you need to deploy defenses.

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