Business Technology Roundtable

Reports of network attacks and stolen data are commonplace. Consumers routinely undergo the stress of fraudulent charges or compromised credit cards. Computer hacker terms like "botnet" are becoming a part of our everyday vocabulary. As a result, enterprise security and risk professionals find themselves on a never-ending quest to maintain the integrity of their communication networks, according to the latest study by Forrester Research. Fortunately, managed service providers offer solutions to help relieve the burden. In its latest initiative to help businesses protect their vital assets from cyber threats and other online attacks, Verizon Business is now offering its next-generation managed security services (MSS) platform, complete with new options. This enhanced platform is designed to safeguard corporate networks by proactively identifying vulnerabilities and prioritizing threats across the extended enterprise -- resulting in better visibility, enhanced security and re...

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...

Because of the expanding growth and complexity of communication networking, and the risks presented by a new breed of skillful hackers, serious security threats are an unfortunate certainty within the highly interconnected office environment of today. These threats are very real and the results are costly to those businesses that have been affected. Apparently, the victims aren't entirely at random, which is often assumed to be the case. According to the 2007 CSI Computer Crime and Security Survey , almost one-fifth (18 percent) of those respondents who suffered one or more kinds of security incident further said they had suffered a "targeted attack" -- defined as a malware attack aimed exclusively at their organization or at organizations within a small subset of the general population. Beyond the Virus Threat Moreover, financial fraud overtook virus attacks as the source of the greatest financial losses. Virus losses, which had been the leading cause of loss for seven s...