Who's the winner?

Hackers are winning the enterprise security fight according to Cisco's 2010 mid-year security report.

"Why do hackers succeed?" said John Stewart, chief security officer at Cisco. "They're lucky, they're patient and they're brilliant. They're also better funded than you." The report found a continuing of the trend towards smaller and smaller targets, as well as pinpointing precise individuals because of their access to key data.

Companies need a special team for cybersecurtity, a group of specialists who know who to contact in law enforcement and how to provide evidence that can be used in criminal prosecutions. These relationships with law enforcement need to be built up and in place before an attack occurs.

Overall the report found three major areas of concern:

• the proliferation of mobile and internet-enabled devices,
• the increasing focus on virtualization and
• the boom in social networking.

Social media is also a new threat vector. The report found half of all staff ignored company policy and accessed social networking sites on company systems and 27% manually change their security settings to allow them to do so. Many of these people are using social games, with 7% of Facebook users spending 68 minutes per day playing the game.

Source: V3.co.uk.