Survey Shows Businesses Increasingly Vulnerable to Security Attacks

📅 October 15, 2001 - Businesses have become increasingly vulnerable to information security attacks despite an industry-wide boost in security budgets over the last year, according to a new survey by Information Security magazine, sponsored by Predictive Systems (predictive.com) and TruSecure Corporation (trusecure.com).

Viruses, worms, Trojans, and other malware infected 90% of the organizationssurveyed, even though 88% had anti-virus protection in place. Thisrepresents an 11% jump from 2000 to 2001, and demonstrates the growingdifficulty to maintain what experts call "controlled access.""Attacks of this nature are increasing in frequency as well as ferocity,"said Ed Skoudis, VP of ethical hacking for Predictive Systems. "Asingle-pronged approach is no longer effective. It is essential thatcompanies adequately assess their vulnerabilities and take a holisticapproach toward addressing them."
According to the survey, organizations reporting Web server attacks doubledfrom 2000 to 2001, from 24% to 48% The number of companies reportingsecurity budgets over $1 million has increased 238% from 1998 to 2001, from8% of responding companies to 27% Buffer-overflow attacks, which allow anattacker to take control of systems such as Web servers and other criticalmachines, hit 33% more companies in 2001 than in 2000.
The survey, which polled 2,545 information security practitioners, wasconducted online in late July and early August 2001 by Information Securitymagazine, Predictive Systems, and TruSecure Corporation. Complete surveyresults can be found at predictive.com or infosecuritymag.com.
As part of its comprehensive approach to addressing virus and worm attacks,Predictive Systems offers its TrustCheck methodology to give clients aquantitative measure of information security for an organization, technicalinfrastructure, or application. In addition, Predictive Systems' securityarchitecture services help clients integrate security into their networksand applications to both prevent potential attacks as well as minimize therisk of damage, while its Ethical Hacking services allow a company touncover vulnerabilities prior to an attack. In the event of an actualsecurity breach, Predictive Systems' incident response team can repel theattack, gather critical information about its origins and what damage it hasdone, and restore business operations to normal.