H.W Blog 5

Ryan Mulvey

Blog  homework 5

Prof. Lawson

Security Trends To Watch In 2012

By Mathew J. Schwartz  InformationWeek
January 17, 2012 09:45 AM

This article is about; how, when, and why businesses, companies and even personal hand held devices get hacked. It talks about how information security has changed and how it’s not an if you’ll get hacked or breached, but when you will. It sates in the article that “According to the "2011 Data Breach Investigations Report" from Verizon, for example, the number of attacks launched online against businesses between 2005 and 2010 increased by a factor of five.” These increases of cyber attacks are huge. Businesses have to be able to tell when they are breached, how they are breached and how to fix it. A lot of companies are not capable of this, and that’s the problem. In the article it states “The new mandate, then, is not just to maintain killer defenses, but also to have the right technology and practices in place toquickly detect when the business has been breached, and then to block the attack and ideally identify how the breach occurred and what might have been stolen.” What this means is that they don’t only have to find away to tell when they’re hacked but what information and important data was stolen. Many companies go wrong, because they think they are not a target for these attacks and they have nothing to offer, but they are wrong. No one is exempt from these cyber attacks.

            Another  big point in this article is that it talks about that a lot of these attack are occurring on Windows systems and Android Handhelds.  This is because their networks don’t have the antivirus protection that it should have and it leaves their networks extremely vulnerable.

The article also touches on the fact that  PC’s are at more of a risk for these attacks than Smartphone’s, but companies have to still take the responsibility and take more rigorous actions to protecting these devices, because attacks can still happen. In the article it states “ If mobile devices aren't under attack to the extent that PCs are, mobile devices still carry a well-known security risk: they tend to get lost or stolen. That fact alone should be reason enough for businesses to take a more rigorous approach to securing mobile devices.”

All of these problems with cyber attacks can be very devastating to many companies and business. Companies and business now have to spend a lot more money on protecting their network and new software to figure out how to fix these problems.