Major data breaches, unique and sophisticated hacking
attempts, and large-scale cases of identity fraud and
account exploitation are frequent sights on industry news networks, blogs and
feeds. And while reporting the major incidents shows us how damaging cyber
attacks can be, they fail to illustrate just how often the attacks occur. McAfee’s
recent survey of over 600 “critical infrastructure enterprise” technology
executives does exactly that—and the results are disturbing.
In a January 29 article on PCMag’s Security Watch blog, McAfee reported at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting that
robotic distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are so commonplace that
major industries experience them multiple times per month.
“64 percent of those
surveyed have experienced [DDoS attacks] that disrupted operations; 29 percent
get them multiple times per month.”
In terms of verification security protecting these major enterprises, which include banks and
utility corporations, conditions are actually getting worse in spite of the
evidence of identity theft. McAfee states that only one-fifth of those surveyed believed their
networks to be secure, with one-third claiming their state of security worse
than in years past due to funding issues.
With evidence as clear as McAfee has provided, shouldn’t all
American businesses be strengthening their security measures?