SECURITY THREATS FOR ORGANISATIONS USING SNAS

The security threats and their strategic implications for organisations using SNAs

Security threats and their strategic implications for organizations using SNAs

Introduction

Undoubtedly, the most high-profile IT security story of 2010 was the WikiLeaks saga, which saw a number of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks launched against companies withdrawing support for the controversial whistle-blowing site. There was also the widely reported 'Stuxnet' worm, linked with targeting SCADA systems used for industrial applications, including nuclear facilities. These exemplify the development of cybercrime from the initial stages of proof-of-concept and mischievous virus-writing, through financially motivated, organized criminal activity - undoubtedly still the primary threat - and finally a third, political motivation - a trend predicted to continue.

In addition to increasingly prevalent social networking threats, tried and tested cybercrime tactics continue to plague Internet users. Although some websites are created with the intention of infecting visitors, legitimate websites continue to be a popular target for attack, as hackers who compromise them can distribute malware to unsuspecting Internet users (Amara, Landry and Doloreux 2009). The United States continues to be the home of most infected webpages. However, over the past six months alone, European countries have become a more abundant source of malicious pages, with France in particular displacing China from the second spot, increasing its contribution from 3.82 to 10.00% of global malware-hosting websites (Baggio and Cooper 2010).

Many computer users still don't realize that you can wind up with something nasty on your machine simply by visiting a website, continued Cluley. Over the year, we saw an average of 30,000 new malicious URLs every day - that's one every two-to-three seconds (Brown and Duguid 1998). More than 70% of these are legitimate websites that have been hacked - this means that businesses and website owners could inadvertently be infecting their patrons unintentionally and without knowledge.

More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy, and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards. This paper will attempt to present a critical analysis and discussion developed through research and critical review of examples from case study organization examples from case study organization and theoretical perspectives.

Discussion

According to the critical mass theory of interactive media, there is a major probability that people tend to seek out and accept technology driven methods to communicate with each other. This theory has held true with SNAs over the last decade and it would not be incorrect to consider the theory to be valid in the long run as ...