Category: Statistics

Of the firms surveyed, only 4 percent said their employers are doing enough to address the issue, and just 20 percent of respondents said that they feel confident that their companies’ intellectual property is being sufficiently safeguarded.

Some 24 percent of interviewees said that the security tools they have installed are being used effectively.

While phishing schemes continue to pose a major threat to companies’ customer information and brand reputations, only 18 percent of those executives surveyed said that their firms have employed technologies aimed at preventing the attacks.

Deloitte said that 37 percent of the companies it interviewed have provided additional security training to their employees within the last 12 months.

While 74 percent of survey respondents said that they expect to spend more time and money on improving security in 2006, the average budget increase among those companies was only 9 percent.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/20060621/tc_zd/181598

Many industry watchers expected audit fees would drop during public companies’ second year of complying with Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404, which requires companies to attest to the effectiveness of controls put in place to protect financial reporting systems and processes. Instead, they increased: Audit fees rose 22% for small companies, 6% for midsize companies and 4% for large companies (as defined by Standard & Poor’s indices).

Smaller public companies, in particular, felt the burden of increased audit costs, said Tom Hartman, corporate governance study director and business law partner at Foley & Lardner, in a teleconference. The fees companies pay their directors also have climbed considerably as a result of corporate governance and public disclosure reforms implemented since the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley.

Overall annual director fees have increased an average of 71% for small companies, 64% for midsize companies, and 58% for large companies between 2001 and 2005.

When all the expenses are tallied, companies with under $1 billion in revenue spent an average of $2.9 million to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley in 2005, and companies with greater than $1 billion in revenue spent $11.5 million.

For companies of all sizes, audit fees represent the biggest portion of those expenses, followed by the cost of lost productivity.

For the first time in four years, not a single respondent said the reforms are not strict enough, Hartman said.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/061506-sarbanes-oxley.html

“We’re seeing fewer of some of the attacks that have been such a plague for us in many years, and respondents are using less and less money.” Last year that percentage was 35 percent.

When it comes to cybercrime losses, consumers might be bearing the brunt of them, and they are not covered by the survey, Richardson suggested.

http://news.com.com/2100-7349_3-6083860.html?part=rss&tag=6083860&subj=news

“The swelling amount of spyware, as illustrated in the Aladdin CSRT report, is a direct representation of the fast-growing network of organized criminals that empower themselves through computers rather than physical theft,” said Shimon Gruper, vice president of technologies for the Aladdin eSafe Business Unit.

http://www.it-observer.com/news/6444/enterprises_attacks_tripled/

Merrill, however, paints a relatively rosy security picture, with execs predicting growth of 4.8 percent in their security spending this year. American CIOs, on the other hand, seem more willing to open their wallets than European execs, envisaging a 5 percent spending hike, compared to just 4.1 percent on the other side of the Atlantic.

But even with healthy security spending levels, there is a shift underway in what users are buying, according to Richard Stiennon, chief research analyst at IT-Harvest. “Probably the biggest shift has been toward compliance technologies for things like reporting, storing, and archiving,” explains Stiennon, with users still feeling the strain of legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Yesterday, analyst firm Infonetics also reported that many users are looking deeper into network access and content security solutions, which is delaying some core security purchasing until later in 2006.

Users and analysts have identified uncertainty in the U.S. economic climate as a key factor in the overall spending slowdown. “The end of 2005 was slow, then it picked up in the spring, but now it has slowed down again,” explains Dan Tanner, a member of the Storage Networking User Group of New England (SNUGNE) and founder of consulting firm ProgresSmart.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=96276&WT.svl=news1_4

He outlined one operation, Operation Firewall, which in July 2003 netted the perpetrators behind Shadowcrew, Carderplanet, and Darkprofits sites. “By early 2003, things were rolling; we saw sites like the Brotherhood of Carders (8600 user accounts) as well buying and selling information hacked out of the system, but there was no resource more responsible than Carderplanet,” Jacobson said.

The Russian speaking community, the Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic communities are unmatched as a source for [financial] crime and no other community comes close.” Jacobson said that more recently, carding forums have added feedback forums.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9000808&source=rss_topic82