“I report to head office in Moscow” is a line which either means you’re in a James Bond movie or at a lunch briefing with the Russian security company Kaspersky.
While the James Bond movie would be fun, the Kaspersky lunch was an interesting briefing on their new security product.
A notable aspect of the discussion was the explosion in malware – there are over a hundred million malicious programs circulating on the internet with over 200,000 new threats every day.
“We struggle to keep up,” says Kaspersky Lab ANZ Managing Director, Andrew Mamonitis.
That a security company with 2,700 specialists struggles to keep up with the evolving threats emphasises the scale of the task facing a network administrators and IT managers.
It’s a task beyond all but the biggest companies.
Sometime ago I suggested every computer user should assume their computers are compromised and managers should work work on limiting what intruders can do to system.
With staff bringing their own devices to work, those risks are multiplied as some devices will almost certainly be infected with malware.
There are some basic things that computer users should do to make their systems harder to break however it’s almost impossible to protect against a zero-day exploit or the efforts of a sophisticated and determined hacker.
With our homes and motor cars, we realise it’s almost impossible to keep determined thieves out, so we take precautions like alarms, immobilisers and basic security such as keeping valuables out of plain view.
That attitude is what we now need with our computer technology, any hope of keeping your office server impregnable from outside attack is long gone.