Month: May 2004

The professional service firm’s annual Global Security Survey showed a dramatic rise in the number of respondents reporting system breaches.

“Security threats such as viruses, worms, malicious code, sabotage and identity theft are real and have already cost millions of dollars in lost revenues to institutions globally,” Ted DeZabala a principal and national leader of Security Services for Deloitte & Touche, said in a statement.

Despite that, fewer respondents reported fully deployed antivirus measures — 96 percent last year compared to 87 percent this year. Also, IT security budgets were flat at more than 25 percent of the survey base, with 10 percent reporting reduced security budgets.

The survey found gains in the areas of privacy and regulatory compliance efforts, where two-thirds claim to have a privacy management program in place, up incrementally by 6 percent over the previous year. Most identified themselves as “effective users of demonstrated technology” according to the surveys authors. That said, only 9 percent were willing to take risk associated with being an early adopter.

The survey also found vulnerability and identify management technologies were the two most common technology initiatives planned for pilot programs or deployment in the next 18 months.

A recent Gartner group survey estimated the cost of fake e-mail ‘phishing’ attacks at $1.2 billion dollars. This year also looks to be bad for viruses and Trojans of all sorts, though according to one study infection rates are holding steady.

More info: http://www.internetnews.com/fina-news/article.php/3360961

The release accompanying the survey has it differently.

“Practitioners from Deloitte’s Global Financial Services Industry practice conducted face-to-face interviews with senior information technology executives of the top 100 global financial services organizations (sic),” it says. The survey claims that the results, published this month, “provide a global benchmark for the state of security in the financial sector.” Did the company actually speak to representatives from the top 100?

Kevin Shaw, Leader Security Services Group – Asia Pacific for the company’s Enterprise Risk Services, said: “What we can say is that interviews with senior information technology executives of top 100 global financial services organizations (sic) were conducted and that the sample includes 31 of the top 100 global financial services institutions.” He said four Australian banks were among those interviewed but refused to name them.

“I am sure that you will understand that respecting the confidentiality of those who were so kind as to participate is very important to us, and so unfortunately, we cannot denote the true number of organizations (sic) that have participated in the survey,” Shaw said.

“If we indicate the number of organizations, (sic) people may start to reverse engineer the number and make assumptions about who participated. This could have impact on two levels, one being that unfair assumptions are made leading to potentially erroneous conclusions, and the other in that they circumvent our intent and promise of allowing organizations (sic) to remain anonymous.”

Last year’s survey had some question marks over it as well. The company claimed the participants represented 35 percent of the top 500 global financial services organisations, which would have meant that 175 companies of the top 500 had been interviewed. However, when asked about it, Deloitte admitted that the facts were that 35 percent of the top 50 global financial services organisations – meaning 17 or 18 – had been involved.

More info: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/28/1085641687991.html

The report said server unit growth for the March quarter was up 27 percent (1.6 million units) over last year while worldwide revenues grew 9.3 percent to $11.8 billion.

Despite legal threats from SCO Group and competition from Microsoft, Gartner’s report said Linux continued to be the growth powerhouse in the operating systems server market, with a revenue increase of 57.3 percent in the first quarter of 2004.

Windows continued to be the operating system of choice for servers with revenue hitting 35.1 percent of total market share. On a shipment basis, Windows dominated all others with 69.4 percent of the OS server market.

As for Unix, the study said the OS suffered a decline with first quarter revenue down 2.3 percent from the first quarter of last year.

Each of the major vendors of the low-end servers, IBM, (Quote, Chart) HP, (Quote, Chart) Sun, (Quote, Chart) and Dell (Quote, Chart), have something to brag about — depending on how they read Gartner’s tea leaves with respect to product cycles, industry segment emphasis and geographic demand patterns.

Although IBM made the most money from servers in the last three months, HP sold the most units, and Dell gained the most ground, said Mark Stahlman, technology analyst with Caris & Company.

He told internetnews.com the only vendor who is positioned for significant upside in this market is Sun.

Sun has been working very hard to make up for lost time, bolstering its volume server lineup with support for x86 products.

The company recently said its Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) for the Solaris OS on x86, doubled in size in the last six months.

More info: http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3359981

Spam hotspots are emerging as the global levels of junk mail worldwide continue to increase. MessageLabs figures also indicate significant regional variations and spam “hot spots”, despite attempts to deter spammers through legislation. Currently, email traffic sent to the United States, the UK, Germany, Australia and Hong Kong represents more than 97 per cent of the global spam volumes being filtered by MessageLabs. The figures suggest spammers are targeting English-speaking countries and regions where the proliferation of Internet/email usage is at its highest. The majority of spam originates in the US, with Boca Raton, Florida the worldwide capital of junk mail.

Mark Sunner, Chief Technology Officer at MessageLabs, commented “The US presents the widest market for spammers in terms of Internet access and adoption of email as a communications tool. While it currently has the worst global figure at 83 per cent, it’s only a matter of time until the UK falls victim to similar volumes in around six-months time, whilst Asia-Pacific countries will likely see the same impact in 12 months time. “Countries where English is a widely-used language, particularly in electronic communication, will always be a natural target for spammers as mass mailing in one common language is by far the easiest way for them to disperse their messages,” he added.

A study from rival message filtering firm Clearswift out yesterday suggests financial spam (37.8 per cent) is close to overtaking pharmaceutical spam (40 per cent) as the most common form of junk email. Sexually explicit spam has been on decline ever since, accounting for only five per cent of total spam seen by Clearswift last month.

US Federal Trade Commission rules insisting that porno spam needed to be labelled as “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT” came into effect last week. US laws (the CAN-SPAM Act) allow companies to send junk email without prior consent but it does at least criminalise hiding the true origins of spam. European anti-spam laws insist on prior consent but largely fail to criminalise spamming. Only Italy and Australia, as far as we’re aware, have anti-spam laws that both insist of prior consent backed up by criminal sanctions against offenders.

More info: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/25/spam_deluge/