Executives deal with risk all of the time, except that is, information technology risk. For many non-IT leaders in government and business, IT risk is outside their comfort zone. Oregon CISO Theresa Masse wants to change that.

When it comes to sizing up the privacy agenda for 2011, the tone at the top of organizations is all about improving data security, says privacy expert and lawyer Lisa Sotto.

To Brian Lapidus, COO of Kroll's Fraud Solutions group, the main threat to data security can be summed up in two words: social networking.

Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee Labs threat research vice president, discusses the company's annual threat predictions, saying: "We are seeing an escalating threat landscape in 2011."

"The environment that started by supporting whistleblowers ... is essentially morphing into 'Gee, we as an organization need to be completely transparent, whether we want to or not,'" says Cal Slemp, managing director of Protiviti.

Thwarting the insider threat entails more than knowing an individual with access to a computer, but to recognize the synergy between the individual, organization, technology and environment, I3P Research Director Shari Lawrence Pfleeger says.

2011 will be the year of more -- more sophisticated malware, more WikiLeaks-style breaches and more regulatory compliance headaches.

NIST's Ron Ross Tackles the Risk Management Framework

If Marcus Ranum were your CISO, this would be his 2011 resolution: To launch a "War Games" style exercise.