With 2010 well behind us, I look forward to 2011 and in all the ways we can make a positive impact in protecting our merchants’ businesses and customers. I also hope as an industry we continue to learn from the past, making data breach incidents and fraud decline more and more year over year.

With that I'd like to direct you to the latest post by Rob McMillon at RSA. In this post he discusses why we all need to think well into the future or else we'll never be ahead of the fraudsters. I think this is essential in preventing, detecting and reducing fraud and security breaches. We can't continue to initiate the chase miles behind and then try to catch up only to fall behind once again. This turns into an exhausting game where our merchants and their customers will continue to fall victim to new attacks.

Rob also outlines some resolutions for 2011. A couple of them really resonated with me. First he mentions eliminating assumptions. To me this is paramount in developing solutions and ideas that make it harder and harder for fraudsters to concoct and succeed at their attacks. Again, we must learn from the past, but not become narrowed or blinded by it. The second resolution is try to think like an attacker. If we approach each day with this in the back of our minds, we're able to more effectively combat and prevent attackers from ever getting off the ground.