CSI Survey - Cyber Attacks Creating Disruption for Web Users

Computer Security Institute (CSI) has recently conducted a survey on cyber attacks according to which online services are facing a lot of disruption now-a-days.

During 2009, over 64% respondents out of 443 surveyed have encountered malware attacks, a rise from 50% during 2008. The attacks resulted in download of different programs that raised the infection's danger as soon as the original malware got installed.

The survey also reveals that about 35% of respondents encountered personalized assaults, with 4% experienced over 10 such incidences.

According to the survey, phishing scammers have had a great contribution in online attacks this year. phishing means an attempt where the e-mail recipient is deceived into following a web-link and revealing personal information. Since it isn't difficult to spoof a sender's name, careless users could inadvertently divulge their usernames and passwords of major Internet sites like leading banks, PayPal and eBay, say security experts.

An astonishing 29% of respondents said they experienced Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, an increase from 21% during 2008. Such attacks are designed to overload Web-servers so that a brief disruption in service could be accomplished. The increase in DDoS attack is unexpected since attackers know that such attacks are much less lucrative in comparison to data breaches.

Expressing his views on the survey's results, Sara Peters, Senior Editor at CSI and author of the report, stated that frauds involving financial matters represented a major problem as they entailed high costs, as reported by Dark Reading on 24 November, 2009. Actually, the survey showed that enterprises' costs from financial frauds estimated to about $450,000 per case.

For the first time, CSI enquired from security professionals regarding the technologies they were employing in addition to what level of satisfaction they obtained from them. Curiously, as per a 1-5 scale, where 1 represented the lowest level of satisfaction, all categories of security products scored at least 3.0.

Hence, the survey study outlined that respondents didn't think that the confrontations they encountered were because of lack of their expenditure on security software or disappointment from them (security products), instead that even after making all their endeavors, it still couldn't make respondents know if those endeavors were really helpful.

Related article: Cisco Finds Two Vulnerabilities and Recommends for Patches

» SPAMfighter News - 12/9/2009