Battling The Rising Business Costs Of Cybercrime While Protecting Valuable Data
Written by: Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CTO of Finjan
Cybercrime is on the rise, with data breaches becoming more frequent and more severe. This “cybergeddon”1 comes with a hefty price tag for businesses. The 2008 United States “Annual Study: Cost of a Data Breach”2 report of the Ponemon Institute found that the average cost of an incident is currently estimated at $202 per compromised record or an average of $6.65M per incident.Business costs resulting from successful cybercrime attacks consist of: financial damages3, (including effects on stock price), lawsuits and class actions, brand damage, personal consequences for executives, loss of IP, loss of productivity, loss of customers, and compliance failure with mandatory regulations such as PCI DSS and SOX.
Considering the current economic climate, organizations need to operate within limited budgets. For their Web security needs, they must look for solutions that can protect them against the latest and highly sophisticated cybercrime attacks, while at the same time selecting a Web security solution that has low cost of ownership (TCO) and a high return on investment (ROI).
Cybercrime pays – big time. A recent research of Finjan’s Malicious Code Research Center (MCRC) shows that criminal members of a rogueware affiliation network easily make $ 10,800 a day. Enterprises around the world are the prime cybercrime target – especially their corporate data that can be used or traded for profit. To this end, they use sophisticated toolkits and techniques (including trojans and obfuscated codes) aimed at abusing the flaws or holes in Internet browsers. By inserting their malicious codes into compromised legitimate websites and webpages and using dynamically created obfuscated code. They also leverage the most advanced techniques and services that Web 2.0 can offer to carry out their criminal activities.
This makes it increasingly more difficult for traditional Web security solutions to prevent cybercrime attacks in today’s dynamic web environment. As a result, organizations using signature-based security products are potentially vulnerable. The latest trend in cybersecurity for enterprises, as recommended by leading analysts, is the Secure Web Gateway (SWG). To provide a cost effective protection against the current cybergeddon, such a SWG needs to incorporate a unified approach that combines multi-layered web security, DLP, content caching, application control, URL filtering and Web 2.0 security on a single dedicated appliance. This enables companies to enjoy optimal multi-layered protection in real time, with lower TCO and higher ROI. The lower TCO is achieved by utilizing a single appliance that centrally manages all security features, saves power consumption, floor space, hardware-related costs, and reduces administration time.
By Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CTO of Finjan
Footnotes:
1 “US Security experts fear Cybergeddon” by AFP
ABC News, January 7, 2009
2 “United States 2008 Annual Study: Cost of a Data Breach”
Ponemon Institute, January 2009
3 “Data breach costs, customer churn up a bit; Repeat offenders abound” by
ZDNet, February 2, 2009
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