SIR – The number of intrusion attacks on UK corporate networks are soaring, with even the smallest of enterprises facing an average of 500 application attacks each month from viruses and worms.
That’s the major finding of our latest industry survey, carried out for us by FITE IT among 50 UK enterprises over a six-month period. No less than 70% of the businesses studied experienced more than 1,500 attacks over a two-week period in August thanks to the SoBig virus (see the Virus Eye section of Secure IT, SMT, October 2003, p64).

The reality of the situation is that attacks are always going to happen so businesses need to do everything in their power to minimise their impact. Managers should be aware that adopting real time security protection at multi-gigabit speeds ensures protection without any degradation in network performance.

Although our study has demonstrated that the need for security against ‘first strike’ ramifications of attacks is paramount, the capture of viruses by corporate firewalls only protects businesses at the network access point and not at an application level. As web-based distributed applications become more pervasive, the majority of data security threats facing corporations will be at that level.

From now on, the IT security solutions sourced by end users must be able to scan, identify and ultimately block attacks at accelerated throughputs while barring attacks from slipping through port 80.

Source

SMT

Postscript

Anthony Crowley, Regional Director, Radware