How safe is our data?

Nowadays, many viruses and destructive data methods are being made every single day. The cyber world has become a battle field with no end to stopping the online security threats. Here we can take a look at some of the latest online security threats.

Insider threats are the highest-ranking IT security concern. Insider misuse and unauthorized access by insiders are considered the top two IT security threats by our survey respondents.

Spam follows closely behind insider threats as a category of concern. This may be attributed to the prevalence of spam, the fact that spam is highly visible to everyone in the organization and that spam serves as a vector for many other types of attacks.

Malware such as computer viruses, worms, trojans, adware, and spyware still ranks highly in the list of concerns. There is significant variation between organizations in terms of the frequency of malicious code attacks, most likely due to variation in how well organizations defend against such security events.

Besides that, unauthorized access by outsiders is ranked only slightly behind malware in terms of seriousness. It is quite possible, however, that in some organizations, hackers have obtained unauthorized access without the awareness of the organization. Hence, the number of hacking incidents is likely underreported in the statistics.

Another point is that IT security professionals take the threat of physical loss or theft of computer hardware and storage somewhat seriously, a significant number think it is only a minor threat.

Although many organizations are experienced in fighting electronic fraud, survey respondents rank fraud in the middle of the list of security concerns. These results most likely reflect the fact that many high-risk organizations, such as banks and financial institutions. IT security professionals are not sufficiently worried about the threat of pharming attacks. Similarly, we do not find very high levels of awareness of the threat of phishing, at least among respondents outside of the financial services sector.

Most IT security professionals and managers do not view electronic vandalism/sabotage as a serious threat. Such computer crimes in the past were motivated by a desire to gain bragging rights among hackers.

IT professionals vary considerably in their perception of the seriousness of denial of service (DoS) attacks. This disparity is most likely due to the variation in the "attractiveness" of the organizations in our sample as targets.

Extortion by electronic means ranks last in the list of IT security concerns. This is most likely because of the infrequency of such attempts. Therefore, it is not surprising that most IT security professionals do not consider extortion a serious threat.






Related Links:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_online_security_threats_for_2009.php
http://www.computereconomics.com/article.cfm?id=1214
http://www.entrepreneur.com/technology/techtrendscolumnistpeteralexander/article78616.html