Businesses Underestimate Botnet Threat

CDW, a company which leads in providing technology services and products to government, business and education recently conducted a survey on large-and-medium businesses' 200 IT managers for determining their opinion on botnets. It also sought for what the managers thought about available safety procedures given the extensively publicized security breaches.

An analysis of the study's results indicated that with respect to other current dangers related to IT security, the majority of IT managers didn't regard botnets as the greatest danger for them in the future.

Moreover, with respect to all present security dangers, 37% of respondents said that accidents and/or negligence leading to loss of tools, and data damage due to internal dangers would pose as their next most crucial IT security problem.

Meanwhile, according to 24% of participants, developed varieties of current dangers like worms/viruses/breaches were their greatest danger. This is ahead of targeted intrusions or malware attacks for 18%, and untargeted or autonomous botnets for 14%.

The survey, which was conducted during February 2010, coincided with the period when the Zeus botnet contaminated PCs at numerous enterprises across the globe.

Significantly, Zeus has already hijacked government and commercial computers along with over 68,000 large businesses' login credentials so far. Further, it has managed to get its criminal subsidiaries gain admission into the Internet banking accounts and e-mail systems of corporations. Accordingly, in July 2009, Zeus had already hijacked a total of 3.6m PCs in USA.

Stated Senior Vice-President of strategic solutions and services, Doug Eckrote of CWD that the poll results proved that the greatest worry for IT management was human malice or error. NETWORK Computing published this on June 1, 2010.

According to Eckrote, the IT management's problem still caused the trouble of observing a lot of companies continuing to struggle tackling worms and viruses that were preventable, while the stakes were found to be so much more with respect to newer threats' dangers.

Thus enterprises needed to critically secure themselves using readily available and effective protections against common dangers, and also release resources and time for investment in dynamic action against botnets, targeted assaults and data loss, he added.

Related article: Businesses Asked To Shoulder Security Of Online Transactions

» SPAMfighter News - 6/28/2010