Industry View

Cyber Crime: The 2009 Mega Threat

What threats to a company's sensitive and confidential data are getting worse, staying the same or actually becoming more manageable?

By Dr. Larry Ponemon

Data Breaches and Outsourcing Risks Continue
Data breaches and outsourcing are forecast to remain at the same level of risk. IT security practitioners continue to worry about data breaches because according to our study only 16 percent are very confident or confident that current security practices are able to prevent customer and employee data from being lost or stolen. Therefore, it is understandable why the majority of respondents in IT security believe data breaches will continue to pose a high and very high security threat to their organizations.

Because IT security professionals don�t see the outsourcing of sensitive and confidential information to third parties as decreasing, it will remain a serious risk to an organization�s information assets. The concern expressed by IT security practitioners in our study is about the difficulty in protecting sensitive or confidential information when unauthorized parties might be able to access private files.

Certain Risks Are Considered more Manageable
Becoming less of a concern are risks associated with a mobile work force, virtualization and P2P file sharing. Although it seems that the mobile work force will pose less of a risk, respondents believe the most significant security threat is the inability to properly identify and authenticate remote users. With respect to P2P, it is the concern that inadvertent transfers and disclosures of documents that reside on an organization�s computers and laptops will occur. The most significant risk associated with virtualization technology is the inability to properly identify and authenticate users to multiple systems and third party access to private files without authorization.

Organizations are faced with a plethora of security threats to their confidential and sensitive data assets. Forecasting the areas that pose the highest risk will help companies create an IT security strategy that is as cost effective as possible in times of tightening budgets.

Dr. Larry Ponemon is the chairman and founder of The Ponemon Institute. For a copy of the 2009 Security Mega Trends Survey report, please contact research@ponemon.org.

• Email
• Print
• Comments
• Digg This
• SlashDot

• Why Cybercrime is Thriving
• Cybercrime '09: Too Late to Save Facebook?
• Symantec Threat Report: Three Ways Internet Crime Has Changed