Symantec: Online Security Concerns Growing in the Workplace

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > Symantec: Online Security Concerns Growing in the Workplace

News

Symantec: Online Security Concerns Growing in the Workplace

4/14/2008

By Jabulani Leffall

In the world if IT security, it's a well known secret that end users in Windows processing environments put themselves at risk whenever they check their MySpace and Facebook pages, or shop for plane tickets, computers and other goods and services--all while at the workplace.

Now, a pair of reports from Symantec Security Response--including the 13th annual "Global Internet Security Threat Report" (available as a PDF here), released on Tuesday--reveal that such actions may imperil some enterprise environments, especially given the rise of browser-based hacking and concerns about security in the Web 2.0 era.

Symantec culled its findings from several sources, including data gathered from network-monitoring software in the hundreds of countries where the security software consultancy does business. Symantec also relied on research gleaned from third-party sources such as other security firms, exploit research sites and its own security monitoring blogs. The report covers statistics gathered for the period between July and December of 2007

"What we find increasingly is that these attacks, using the Internet as a vector, leverage three things: a mature underground economy for hackers, client-side attack toolkits such as bots, and the wildcard: human behavior in the workforce," said Ben Greenbaum, senior research manager for Symantec Security Response. "And it's unfortunate but true that there is no security patch to block the vulnerabilities of social engineering."

Among the key findings in Symantec's "Global Internet Security Threat Report" are some staggering numbers, including the 711,912 new threats discovered in 2007, compared to just 125,243 in 2006. That's an increase of 468 percent.

The report also highlighted several enterprise system weakness trends which are germane to IT pros looking to balance the new work/life spillover in their IT administration space. According to the report, 58 percent of respondent-documented vulnerabilities in the third and fourth quarters of last year affected Web-based software or applications. Of those vulnerabilities, 72 percent were deemed "easily exploitable."

The report also found from its respondents that between Apple, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, it was Redmond that had the shortest security patch research and turnaround time with a six-day flip. On the other hand, Sun's average patch development lead period last year was 157 days.

Here's another development from the report that may foster immediate concern in some IT shops: Of all the patches rolled out by Sun, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard which were deemed either medium or critical (high-severity), more than 50 percent were intended to fix either Web browser or client-side vulnerabilities in the OS and related applications, or both.