Author: admini

There were tens of thousands of threats that affected individual businesses in various ways, depending on what systems and applications they had deployed and what kinds of security systems and practices they had in place.

– In 2000, the CERT Coordination Center, a government-funded security group, recorded 21,756 security-related incidents.
– Four out of five businesses were hit by a virus or worm in 2003, according to a survey of 404 security decision makers by the Yankee Group. Denial-of-service attacks were the second-most-common security incident, hitting about 40% of those surveyed.
– More than half of those surveyed by the Yankee Group expect their security budgets to increase during the next three years, while only 8% expect security spending to decline.

Security analysts and vendors predict that 2004 will bring thousands of new viruses and worms and a huge increase in the use of spyware. They also say that spammers will increasingly adopt tools used by virus writers, adding to the volume of spam and the problems it causes for corporate networks.

“The issue gets serious when it comes to telecommuters using home PCs, which may not have antivirus and firewalls installed,” says Scott Blake, VP of information security at security firm BindView Corp. “The corporation has no control over what software they install on their home PC.” For more than a year, he collected the keystrokes of the customers of the printing and copying chain, including passwords and user names, and used that data to fraudulently open bank accounts.

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17100340

At the SAS Institute Inc. CIO Suzanne Gordon said that security occupies the top spot on the Cary, N.C., software firm’s 2004 wish list. Gordon said that SAS will have a rolling forecast and look at the budget every quarter, so if the company needs a weapon to combat a Blaster worm is needed, she can get it.

For Tsvi Gal, CIO of Warner Music Group in New York, Web services and service-level management in heterogeneous environments, as well as digital rights management, rank in the upper tiers of his list.

Both said that disaster recovery (DR) investments are high priorities, which is in keeping with Forrester’s prediction that DR will be right behind security on the CIO shopping list. Gal said that his company is moving from a model in which DR is considered an issue only for IT departments to one that gets business divisions involved.

The emphasis on DR and business continuity isn’t only a CIO priority, according to Bob Doyle of Dallas-based RPD Global Consulting and a CIO for more than two decades, most recently with Fleming Companies. Rounding out Forrester’s top five CIO priorities for 2004: upgrading existing applications and desktops (“business-as-usual investments” as Gal called them) and compliance with new laws, namely the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

IT outsourcing, one of the hottest topics in 2003, finished closer to the bottom of the 2004 priority pile, with only 24% of respondents saying that they would be exploring outsourcing alternatives in 2004, and only 17% said that moving IT work offshore was of the utmost importance. Forrester finding — that of the firms that already use offshore providers, 68% will send even more work overseas in 2004.

More info: [url=http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid11_gci943125,00.html]http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid11_gci943125,00.html[/url]