Cisco has published its first annual security report, which the vendor says goes beyond focusing on content security threats, such as viruses, worms and the like, but also discusses risk management categories, including vulnerability, physical, legal, trust, identity, human and geopolitical. The report offers predictions for security threats in 2008 and recommendations for safeguarding against those. Among the predictions for ’08 include more sophisticated attacks from professional attackers; malware targeting smartphones, portable media and gaming devices; the increase of blended physical and electronic attacks; business crime to continue as competition becomes fiercer; and more emphasis to be put on protecting a business’ reputation.
Among the recommendations include:
* Conduct regular audits within organizations of attractive targets and evaluate the avenues that can be used to attack them.
* Understand the notion that threats follow usage patterns.
* Change the mindset of employees, consumers and citizens who consider themselves innocent bystanders and empower them to become active influencers with shared ownership over security responsibilities. IT teams should help lead this charge, but it’s not solely their problem.
* Make security education a priority. Businesses, security vendors, and government agencies need to invest in security education and awareness-building. This effort should include industry-wide collaboration among partners and competitors.
* Institutionalize IT security education by incorporating it into school curricula.
* Consider more than just performance when building a secure network. Focus on the network’s ability to collaborate, inspect, adapt and resolve security issues end to end, from gateways and servers to desktops and mobile devices.
* Security vendors need to provide comprehensive security solutions that extend throughout the network infrastructure, application mix and data itself.
Download the full report here.
For more security discussions, follow the blog of Cisco security expert Jamey Heary.
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