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New McAfee CEO Bullish On Evolving Security Threats: Page 2 of 3

The job now is to focus on the evolving threat landscape and the growing business market that is springing up around cyber crime.

During his keynote, DeWalt noted that 37,413 new pieces of malware hit the Internet last year. A hacker, with a multi-star rating, was actually selling an exploit for a Microsoft Excel vulnerability on eBay for $55. And DeWalt, who said he's had his own credit card information stolen, estimated that one out of four people will suffer some kind of digital crime.

Criminals are treating hacking, spamming and malware writing like big business. Botnet herders are making major money renting out their botnets to spammers who want to use the thousands or even hundreds of thousands of zombie computers to send out massive waves of bulk e-mail. Hackers are selling exploits and rootkits. Cyber criminals have their own distribution channels and social and business networks.

Cyber crime, as a whole, will cost $105 billion this year alone, said DeWalt. And the FTC calculated that $58 billion a year will be lost because of data loss alone.

"How do we tag information so it doesn't leave that device unless you want it to?" he asked. "You have to prevent it at the host and at the network. It's one of the biggest market segments coming in data security."