Security Awareness

A multi-faceted approach covering law enforcement, education and user vigilance is vital for cyber safety in Australia to succeed according to the Australian Federal Police (AFP).

Only 16 per cent of organisations that faced a breach in 2011 detected it prior to a notification by a third party, according to an analysis of investigations conducted last year by Trustwave's SpiderLabs security team.

What’s the most important factor of a successful security program? Technology such as endpoint protection? Making sure your change management processes and system development life cycle includes consideration of security risks? Strong policies? Not quite.

Within the past year, we've witnessed a number of highly publicised attacks that have forever changed our notion of just how lethal malware can be. Sure, we always have known that viruses and worms can be dangerous, but we've just witnessed just how effective malware and orchestrated attacks can be at targeting high profile organisations. First, we have the Operation Aurora attacks that started with Google and also targeted companies such as Adobe Systems, Juniper Networks, Rackspace, Yahoo, Symantec, Northrop Grumman and Dow Chemical.

I recently read an article in ZDNet Asia that reported that approximately 67% of Singapore organizations had experience a cyber attack in the last 12 months. Further, 95% of those that were attacked experienced some form of financial impact from the attacks. While I cannot comment on the results of the study directly, the results are not unexpected.