Big Business bears brunt of security attacks

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The UK business sector is suffering more hacking attacks, viruses and network breaches than ever before, with large companies typically being compromised every week, according to this year's official survey of British IT security.

The DTI Information Security Breaches Survey 2004 (ISBS 2004), published in full on Tuesday, showed that two-thirds of firms fell victim to a network attack in the past year.

The average cost of a serious breach has actually fallen to £10,000, compared to £30,000 in 2002, but with the number of malicious incidents on the rise, the overall cost of IT security breaches remains broadly static.

The results from ISBS 2004 show that many major firms are losing millions through failed IT security. The average cost of a serious break to a large company is £120,000, and these large firms are suffering about four breaches a month -- compared to one a month for all businesses.

Launching this year's report, e-commerce minister Stephen Timms said that the UK has reached a watershed for IT security.

"Until now, it was possible to believe that security problems are something that happened to someone else. That illusion has finally been laid to rest," said Timms.

According to ISBS, just a third of companies -- and two thirds of large firms -- have an IT security policy.

"We can't yet say on the base of this survey that risks are being well-managed by UK companies," Timms said.

Talkback

Commenting on the PricewaterhouseCoopers and DTI research, Mike Fenton, director, Network Box UK said: “Today’s results underline what Network Box has been saying for many months. Conventional anti-virus software is not providing the protection that UK companies need. With actively pushed updates and a fully managed service, Network Box technology has successfully protected its many thousands of clients worldwide.”

The survey found that 'UK businesses appear only too aware of the threat posed by viruses, worms, Trojan horses and other malicious code', with 93 per cent having anti-virus software. Despite this 72 per cent of UK businesses suffered one or more infections during the past year.

With 'always-on' Internet connections becoming the norm, the speed with which viruses can spread across the globe has accelerated considerably. Therefore, the timeliness of anti-virus signature updating has become more critical. According to the research, the overwhelming majority of anti-virus products rely on the user periodically polling the anti-virus vendors for signature updates.

Mike commented: “Network Box is different, it uses its unique push technology to update protection - on average 12 times a day. Not only are updates frequent, they are intelligent. For example, the updating takes place within seconds of a new anti-virus signature becoming available.”

The Network Box approach is particularly effective against blended threats when compared to alternative solutions:

· Push updating of anti-virus signatures enables rapid protection to be deployed against traditional e-mail born and other viruses.
· Network Box’s managed service approach means it will expertly configure your firewall to the specific communication needs of your business, so only those ports you need open for commercial reasons are left open, thus reducing the potential for successful firewall intrusion.
· Network Box’s fully integrated Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDP) signature blocking systems means that Network Box protects open ports against know threats, whilst IDP heuristics provide a high degree of protection against unknown threats.

More information about Network Box is at www.network-box.co.uk.

via Facebook 27 April, 2004 17:37
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