Malware Alerts Cost Companies Big

An article review.

Not If You Use Us…

A newly released study highlights the rising costs associated with preventing and responding to malware threats. The study was based on a survey of “630 IT and IT security practitioners in the U.S. who are familiar with their organization’s practices for containing malware infections.”

The study is quick to point out the enormity of our malware woes. According to the study, the average malware alert volume is nearly 17,000 per week. Of those alerts, more than 3,000 are assumed to be reliable threats. What’s staggering is that less than a quarter of those reliable threats are actually investigated.

This article from CRN.com speculates that “part of the problem is a lack of skilled IT staff to identify threats.” Additionally, the study attributes false positives and false negatives as a large part of the problem.

What may be most alarming from the study is that “forty percent of survey respondents indicated that no one person or function is accountable for the containment of malware.”

Thankfully, infotex’s Network Monitoring Services Clients are not accustomed to this paradigm. infotex staffs a Network Operations Center 24x7x365, where our Security Analysts do nothing but watch networks, investigating and responding to threats and anything out of the ordinary in real time.

Sometimes there is more to the story than just compliance. There’s also peace of mind. Learn more about our Network Monitoring Services here.

Click Here To Read the Full Article

The above is what we call an “Article Review.” It is part of our attempt to help our readers find excellent reading materials to back up important technology risk management concepts. We try not to include articles that are merely news or additional news about mainstream issues. Instead, we try to highlight articles that our “typical clients” should be sure to read, or that are about concepts “outside the mainstream media.” infotex does not intend to endorse views represented by the writers of the articles we review, nor do we try to keep our Clients aware of EVERYTHING. For example, if a particular story concept is being reported upon in many different media sources, infotex usually chooses to ignore the story concept altogether, unless we can find a “unique take” on the story concept.

Original article by Robert Westervelt of CRN.com. You can also download the original study from Ponemon Institute.