Last year was been a very strong indicator of the pace hackers are adopting to traditional security measures.  In 2011, a number of  hackers even managed to take a few organizations and governments by surprise, including Sony and EMC’s RSA.

This is a part of the reason some of the biggest vendors in the IT industry are getting into the security business. This slideshow by eWeek rounded up a number of those firms, some of which had particularly noticeable updates.

Intel-McAfee

Intel’s 2010 acquisition of the cybersecurity behemoth finalized this year, and neither of the companies have been sitting ildely since then. McAfee made a buy of its own, and teamed-up with RSA to integrate its ePolicy Orchestrator with two of the latter’s monitoring and management applications. The joint solution is designed to ensure real-time data consistency for security-conscious enterprises.

Cisco Targeting Government Users

In October the networking gear maker introduced a module for its  Integrated Services Routers Generation 2 product line-up  that’s designed to transmit classified data. It features support for several encryption standards, including the NSA’s Suite B.

The backside of Cisco Security

A former Cisco employee named Peter Alfred-Adekeye, who founded a company that eventually sued his former employee in claims of anti-competitive behavior, vented some of his grudges by penetrating Cisco’s corporate network. He was taken into custody for no less than 97 counts of hacking.

IBM Gets Secure with Analytics, Mobile

IBM’s security strategy comes into play across a number of different areas. Big Blue has acquired a hefty number of analytics firms this year, among them Q1 Labs , a provider of security intelligence software. It later embarked on an extensive internal bring-your-own-device policy roll out, which coincided with a product launch of several mobile security management offerings.