After years of struggling with Sarbanes-Oxley and other bits and pieces of regulation, CSOs say compliance is about to get worse. They predict regulation will be messier and complicated in 2006. The big challenge is keeping up when you have to deal with regulations across different jurisdictions, state and international, and coming up with an integrated solution that doesn't burn out staff.

As if that's not bad enough for CSOs, security threats are tipped to become more sophisticated in 2006. phishing scammers are likely to target smaller targets, like credit unions, business worm attacks will be targeting trade secrets and personal data and attacks from crooked insiders are expected to become more prevalent. There are also predictions of more attacks via wireless technology and voice spam.

If there's an upside, it's big bucks for security companies.