Optimal Security : the Lumension Blog

As businesses move at a rapid pace to integrate social media as part of their overall corporate strategy to engage, build brand awareness and drive thought leadership, unfortunately, security has taken a back seat leaving businesses wide open to these Web 2.0 threats. The use of Web 2.0 has opened new risk channels for the [...]

Education is still key to IT security. Just look at users’ passwords. The New York Times reported last week on a study that exposed the overwhelming simplicity of users’ password choices.
According to the study, which was conducted by Imperva, 20 percent of Web users choose a very simplistic password that can be easily guessed — [...]

When you begin to dig into the intricacies of accurately projecting what the threat landscape will look like in the next year, it is actually relatively easy in some respects. Just look at failing defensive technologies and you’ll have a good indication of what will transpire in our network environments. Let me explain.
The best example [...]

We’ve been discussing how unprepared organizations in the U.S. are for cyber attacks, and now there’s new research that backs up these concerns and illustrates the inherent weaknesses that must be addressed if we’re to adequately safeguard our information and vital systems.
A new Ponemon-Lumension survey on the worldwide state of the endpoint shows that companies [...]

Over the past months it has been interesting to watch the furor over certain End-User License Agreements and the definition of data ownership.  Most draconian was the idea that once posted by a user, the data transferred ownership to the social networking site.  This of course has huge implications to an individual user, especially for [...]

Not so long ago, if you wanted to quickly take control of a user’s PC, you scanned the Internet looking for open ports for a vulnerable victim and hacked them with an OS vulnerability. In the age of Web 2.0, OS vulnerabilities have been replaced with browser vulnerabilities as the “keys to the kingdom,” and [...]

My take:

New Internet-based technologies bring new opportunities for the bad guys.
The growth of the applications we use has gone from dozens to nearly 1,000.
The losses are huge, and while the top-line number is disputable, no one can argue that cybercrime losses have reached previously unforeseen levels.
Regardless of whose survey you read, the majority of respondents [...]

I came across an article by Matt Hines of eWeek and Security Watch Blog where he restated some interesting data from a recent Websense study that pointed out that 70% of the Web’s top 100 most popular sites were compromised in some way during the 2nd half of 2008.
I would like to point out that [...]

What are the biggest threats to your organization’s sensitive and confidential data in the next 12 to 24 months?  To help answer this question, we partnered with the Ponemon Institute, a leading research firm, to charter our first 2009 Security Mega Trends Survey to gain greater insight into the key threats and challenges facing organizations [...]

One of the great things about running the marketing function for Lumension is from time to time I get to research fascinating areas of the Information Security market. Lumension’s recent research with the Ponemon Institute on the 2009 Security Mega Trends is one great example of that. We wanted to do this research as organizations [...]