On December 13, Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs rolled out their trusty crystal ball, peered into it and attempted to predict what the biggest security trends of 2011 were going to be. Now that we've hit the midyear mark, we thought it would be fun to take a look back at original list and see how it stacks up to what's going on todayDecember 13, FortiGuard said we would see an increase in global collaborative takedowns

Today FortiGuard says: There is nothing better than seeing wishes come true. At the beginning of the year, we sensed that there would be more resources being put into cyber criminal prosecution and botnet takedowns. Indeed, half way into the year we have seen lots of welcome activity. The Coreflood and Rustock botnets both were taken offline, led by US efforts. Spam rates plummeted nearly 15% for two months following Rustock's takedown. In June, the FBI worked with authorities all over the world to seize machines related to a Scareware criminal ring, alleged to have made $72M in profit and infect nearly a million machines. President Obama also shared his stake in this area when he announced a Global Cybersecurity plan in May. Meanwhile, the European Union has recently sought tougher penalties for the production and creation of botnets.

December 13, FortiGuard said we'd see turf wars and price inflation for today's crime services

Today FortiGuard says: We have not yet seen any new, high profile examples of turf wars fighting over machine control. However, there have been retaliatory attacks against hackers: look no further than the ousting of alleged LulzSec leader Sabu and affiliates. Indeed, there is no honor among thieves, and it is likely only a matter of time before we see efforts to dismantle botnets and infrastructure of competitive criminal gangs.

On December 13, FortiGuard said we would see the leap from 32- to 64-bit infections

Today, FortiGuard says: It seemed to be only a matter of time before we saw more activity with 64-Bit malware. Prior to 2011, one nasty rootkit by the name of TDSS was designed to infect 64-bit Windows operating systems. It became a problem very fast this year: in May this rootkit was one of our top detected pieces of malware in the wild. Microsoft issued a fix in April for a vulnerability TDSS leveraged, which would help mitigate this 64-Bit threat. However, soon after in May, we saw a new variant in the wild that used a different technique to infect 64-Bit systems.

On December 13, FortiGuard said we'd see an increase in cybercriminal recruitment

Today, FortiGuard says: Advertisements continue to flow into underground hacking forums looking to pick up talented developers to help their malicious efforts. For example, advertisements have been seen for crypter developers (code packers to thwart antivirus detection) which offer salaries of up to $2,000 a month. The advertisements, which require a resume submission, even offer bonus reward programs on top of the base salary. While not all organizations may hire like this, there does seem to be a recruiting trend for criminal business, hacking services and hacktivists.

On December 13, FortiGuard said we'd see an uptick in the recycling of malware source code

Today, FortiGuard says: Source code continues to leak into cyber space. Two versions ("v1" and "v2") of the notorious Zeus botnet kit were leaked in April and May. This bot has been one of FortiGuard's most prominent malware detections for years. Available source code for this popular infection means more individuals can customize the code for their own campaigns. Some countries are taking action to prevent the spread and storage of malicious code. In June, for example, the Japanese Ministry of Justice passed the Cybercrime Law, which penalizes malware writers and those who store malware on their systems with up to $6,000 in fines and/or a three year prison term.