January 03, 2013, 8:04 AM —
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The statistics are staggering: Last year, Symantec blocked a total of over 5.5 billion malware attacks, an 81% increase over 2010, and reported a 35% increase in Web-based attacks and a 41% increase in new variants of malware.
If those findings, documented in the company's latest annual Internet Security Threat Report, cause IT leaders to wonder if they've done everything possible to protect their companies, they might consider looking in the mirror.
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That's because security folks, in struggling to establish policies and procedures that are both effective and easy to use, often forget a third and crucial step, experts say: Communicating their security goals in such a way that the broad corporate population not only understands but responds.
"Compliance is necessary, but it's not sufficient," says Malcolm Harkins, vice president and chief information security officer at Intel.
Harkins' goal is to get employees to go beyond compliance toward full commitment to protecting the company's information. "If they're committed to doing the right thing and protecting the company, and if they're provided with the right information, [then] they'll make reasonable risk decisions."
To be sure, employees are not involved in every type of corporate security breach (see Top 10 threat action types), but user behavior and non-compliance are implicated in many, including mobile malware, social network schemes and advanced target attacks. These are increasingly aimed not at CEOs and senior staffers, but at people in other job functions such as sales, HR, administration and media/public relations, as criminals try for "lower-hanging fruit," the Symantec report says.
