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Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Most Enterprises Worldwide Hit by Cyber Attack in 2009
Enterprises are well aware of growing security threats to their organizations, but so far have lacked the resources and staff to deal with increasingly sophisticated and malicious cyber attacks, according to Symantec’s latest “State of Enterprise Security” study. The telephone survey conducted in January contacted 2,100 businesses and government agencies in 27 countries and found that 100 percent of them had experienced cyber losses of some type in the past year. The top three reported losses were theft of intellectual property, theft of customer credit card information or other financial information that resulted in monetary loss in 92 percent of instances.
Respondents on average said they were exploring 19 different IT standards or frameworks to protect their networks and were currently employing at least eight of them.
But IT managers said they are understaffed in key areas, with network security (44 percent), messaging security (39 percent) identified as groups that remain woefully understaffed.
Hacker countermeasures Last week, NetWitness, a Virginia-based computer security firm, disclosed that organized hackers had broken into the computers of 2,411 companies and government agencies over the past 18 months.
In January, senior executives at Exxon Mobile (NYSE: XOM), ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP) and Marathon Oil (NYSE: MRO) confirmed that they were targeted by an extremely aggressive malware campaign attack in 2008 designed to steal key proprietary data—including multi-million-dollar research to locate the next great oil or natural gas discovery.