Business Technology Roundtable

If you thought that cyber security threats were troubling in 2013, then you should brace yourself for the onslaught that's very likely in 2014. A new generation of security threats stemming from progressive business technology trends -- such as BYOD, mobility and cloud services adoption -- will expose organizations to a multitude of new risks. According to the findings of a global security survey sponsored by Dell, the majority of IT leaders around the world say they don’t view these threats as top security concerns and they're not prioritizing how to find and address them across the many points of origin. Apparently, what you don't know can be very harmful. When respondents were asked to look at long term priorities, only 37 percent ranked "unknown threats" as a top security concern in the next five years. Epidemic threats come from all perimeters, and are often hidden in poorly configured IT account settings or permissions, and ineffective data governance...

Cisco released findings from two global studies that provide a vivid picture of the rising security challenges that businesses, IT departments and individuals face -- particularly as employees become more mobile, blending work and personal lifestyles throughout their waking hours. Despite popular assumptions that security risks increase as a person's online activity becomes shadier, findings from the Cisco 2013 Annual Security Report (ASR) reveal that the highest concentration of online security threats tend to target legitimate destinations visited by mass audiences -- such as major search engines, retail sites and social media outlets. Cisco found that online shopping sites are 21 times as likely, and search engines are 27 times as likely, to deliver malicious content than a counterfeit software site. Security risks rise in businesses because many employees adopt "my way" work lifestyles in which their devices, work and online behavior mix with their personal liv...

My conversation with Jonathan Nguyen-Duy, Director of Product Management for Verizon, ended up being very thought-provoking. We were supposed to talk about a new security offering, a backbone-based solution aimed at stopping Internet-based attacks even before they hit a company's network. (I'd spoken previously to Nguyen-Duy about Verizon's risk-correlation service .) Nguyen-Duy is a fount of knowledge about the changing landscape of international cybercriminals. Verizon is expanding its denial-of-service (DOS) detection and mitigation capabilities into eight network management centers serving 24 countries with new levels of scalability -- in part because of an increase in international cybercrime, according to Nguyen-Duy. "Our customers are telling us that the frequency and complexity of DOS attacks has grown. We're now seeing cyberattacks based on social and political activism. We're also seeing less sophisticated hackers getting access to attack methodologie...