Cisco 2009 Midyear Security Report
What do you get when you cross in-depth research on trends and happenings across the security community with an interview with an IT-professional-turned-botmaster? A lot of fascinating insights that shine a light on what’s good and bad in today’s cyber world. And that’s exactly what we’re serving up in the Cisco 2009 Midyear Security Report, which we’re releasing today.
In a nutshell, we’ve got good news and bad news. I’m always one to get the bad news over with first, so let me start there. You can call cybercriminals a lot of things, but you certainly can’t call them unsophisticated in today’s world. In fact, they’re emulating the best of the best – the top practices that businesses adopt for transforming their organizations. So what does that mean exactly? These guys are collaborating and finding complementary ways to partner. Not only that, they’re also getting smart about search engine optimization techniques—spamdexing, which helps drive unsuspecting traffic to their sites to download malware. They also seem to be honing their opportunism.
The good news, however, is that all of this activity has “the good guys” – security professionals – banding together and collaborating more. The community as a whole is now actively working together to stem the criminal activity. Perhaps even more importantly, the Obama administration is taking unprecedented measures to make cyber security a top priority. As part of that effort, they have established a comprehensive platform that sets short- and long-term goals. John Stewart, Cisco’s Chief Security Officer and a contributor to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report for the Obama Administration, blogged about these efforts not too long ago. The focus, scrutiny and energy they are putting behind this certainly sends a strong message – and makes me quite proud to be a security professional.
To learn more about what’s going on with the business of security, be sure to watch our live, interactive broadcast beginning today at 8am Pacific time. We’ll be highlighting the findings of the Midyear Report and discussing best practices for keeping business secure. Also, check out the Cisco Security blog. You’ll find a lot of interesting views from our security experts.
With today’s sputtering markets and transitioning economies, the clarion call is for all of us to increase security awareness and education among our employees and not take anything for granted. If our enemies are thinking outside the box, so must we.
Posted by Marie Hattar at 05:00AM PST
Roland J Jul 29, 2009
This is a pretty good article (the 2009 .pdf in the first link). Although somewhat high-level, it’s very on topic and up to date and covers most recent and current threat sources and instances such as Conficker and botnets as well as a few which are very likely to become major concerns in the near future, e.g. mobile device malware. I am a network engineer myself and I would recommend reading it to my colleagues.