Extracts from Computer Crime and Security Survey

This week I received the 14th Annual Computer Security Institute’s Computer Crime and Security Survey, Executive Summary. It is a long document with plenty of tables and graphs; along with much IT and Information Security related jargon that in reality only IS Professionals fully understand.

However, a few figures catch my attention on the Types of Attacks Experienced by businesses: while some assaults that only technically-inclined individuals can perform vary year after year; some easier to understand for the average person are worth mentioning.
The Exploit of wireless networks reduced considerably to only 7.6%.
The three more prominent types of “attacks”:
3. Insider abuse of Net access or Email @ 29.7%, down from almost 60% in 2007
2. Laptop/mobile device theft @ 42.2%, down from 50.0% in 2007
and
1. Malware infection @ 64.3%. Up from 52% in 2007 and 50.0% in 2008

How are you protecting your data on these regards?
Are your personnel being trained on and constantly reminded of best navigation and Internet use practices?
Are your portable devices secured through strong authentication and encryption?
and
Most importantly, what type of malware protection does your business utilize?

Average losses due to these attacks, although lower than the US$345,000.00 in 2007; are still high at US$234,000.00

I’ve seen companies still using “free” products believing it is cheaper to have these packages instead of proper protection for their assets.
I’m sure yours is not one of them. Is it?

Data Encryption

Barely used for its many “complications”. We only tend to encrypt very specific and important files and/or email messages. Have you ever done it?

However, encryption is getting easier to implement and use, nowadays we can encrypt not only individual files, but also entire folders; and even external memory units (USB Flash Drives) and Hard Drives, both internal and external.

In fact, we do not need to acquire third party products for encrypting anymore; business editions of Windows 7 and the latest OSs and email programs offer it “out of the box”.

Some technologies implicitly offer encryption: wireless routers, VPN systems, email servers, and some more.

Encryption offers a very high level of security for data protection, the only caveat would be that we lose the key: then we are in deep trouble. However, the scale will always tip to the positive and many advantages of encrypting and therefore securing our data.