‘Cyber security’ - Chief Concern for Organizations

Symantec, an Internet security company, released its "2010 State of Enterprise Security Survey - Global Data" report on February 22, 2010. The report points towards the improvement of cyber attacks both in terms of frequency and complexity.

To prepare the report, a survey was conducted during January 2010 of over 2,100 IT managers, CISOs and CIOs in 27 countries. Although respondents belonged to different organizations, majority of them represented technology, telecommunications, health care, financial, retail, and manufacturing industries.

According to the research, cyber attacks hit 75% of organizations during 2009. 42% of respondents said that their most important concern was cyber security more than traditional crime, terrorism and natural calamities combined. The report highlights that cyber attacks frequently prove successful.

The report further highlights that whenever cyber attacks together with data loss take place, the circumstances appear as grim, interviewees' responses during the survey indicated.

As many as 75% of respondents said that cyber attacks struck their organizations last year (2009). Out of them, 36% described the attacks as "highly" or "somewhat" effective.

Cyber attacks against large enterprises entailed a cost of over $2 Million per year in terms of lost productivity, loss of clients, loss of Intellectual Property, expenditure for lawyers' fees and so on.

Commenting on the problem, an IT Director stated that new viruses, backdoor trojans and spyware were seen everyday. According to him, the situation was more than crazy, as reported by Techworld on February 22, 2010.

Symantec in its survey also compiled various types of cyber attacks that criminals launched most frequently. Of these, Web features on average were attacked two times during 2009 when malware was planted. There was also a case of significant Denial of Service attack along with information theft as another one, the survey discovered.

Expressing his views on the research's shocking discoveries based on the incidents of 2009, Matthew Steele, Director, Strategic Technology at Symantec, concluded that organizations both big and small in the present time had a common concern that of 'security,' as reported by Csoonline on February 22, 2010.

Related article: “Loopholes did not cause online banking thefts”: ICBC

» SPAMfighter News - 3/4/2010