Cloudmark Inc. has used its position in carrier-grade messaging infrastructure and security to talk about the evolving landscape for this technology and point to technology predictions that will affect the IT messaging security world in 2011.

Stuart Paton, senior solutions architect at Cloudmark notes that there has been a lot of hype around IPv6, but little has been discussed regarding its effect on what it will mean for the spamming industry. As IPv4 addresses run out in the year ahead, Paton argues that this issue will come to the fore, as ISPs, businesses, and industry bodies migrate to IPv6. This move will enable spammers to use many more IP addresses to send their messages around the world, which will be much harder to blacklist.

"If we are to approach this issue appropriately, there must be an open discussion on how to effectively work together and ensure that this doesn’t open up a new spamming floodgate. Cloudmark has been working with top ISPs and recommends blocking inbound mail from IPv6 addresses except from their own known customers. This would allow ISPs to continue without business disruption or without enabling a hole in the network security for spammers," said Paton.

Going on to discuss the continuous rise of social networks and how this has created a new channel for spam messages, Paton suggests that we will continue to see this being leveraged (negatively) increasingly in the year ahead. Whether it is emails posing as legitimate social networking messages, or spam passing though the networks themselves, users will be targeted in increasingly sophisticated ways.

IPv6 as a successor to IPv4 (the first publicly used Internet Protocol in use since 1981) has been described as being on a "slow march" and is still seemingly very much in discussion. The rise of this technology and the implications that it will have for software developers and web developers will surely give rise to more discussion of this kind.