White Papers for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)

Safe and Productive Browsing in a Dangerous Web World: The Challenge for Business

Sophos

Cybercriminals have traditionally used email as their preferred vector of attack. However, as organizations have become wise to this danger and introduced measures to protect their email systems, hackers have shifted their attentions to the still largely unprotected web, using web-based malware to steal confidential information directly or to establish botnets – networks of hijacked computers – from which spyware, viruses, spam and other threats can be distributed.

Constantly taking advantage of any new infrastructure or browsing vulnerabilities, hackers are able to post their malicious code on legitimate websites – at the beginning of 2008, webpages were being infected at the rate of 6000 a day, or one every 14 seconds. Such is the scale of the problem that the second most common piece of malicious code blocked by Sophos during 2007 was Mpack, a malware creation kit for webpages freely available as an internet download.

With just 15% of businesses currently having some form of proactive threat protection at their web gateway, and web browser patches very often not being kept up to date, it easy for hackers to infect thousands of systems every day via the web.

The impact of this activity is extremely lucrative for the criminals – a single compromised computer can give access to thousands of records. It is also extremely costly to businesses – estimated at 197 US dollars per compromised customer record in 2007.

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