One of the most basic things you need to consider when doing business online is that the World Wide Web is an open arena with no established security. Once you have learned to appreciate that the inte ... [Read more]
A new survey performed by the Ponemon Institute shows that both businesses and private computer users frequently deal with security issues from hackers and other malicious attackers.The research institution surveyed IT departments and IT security practitioners in the United States, France, Germany and the UK. A shocking 90 percent of U.S. businesses said that their organizations’ computers were “breached” by hackers at least once in the past year, and 59 percent of respondents said that their systems were breached more than once.
Perhaps more surprisingly, 53 percent of these businesses had no confidence that they’d be able to stop security breaches in the next year.Digital security issues are a major concern for modern businesses. Corporations paid over $1 trillion to repair network damage, recover from intellectual property loss and to handle the other consequences of IT security breaches in 2008.However, the threat is by no means limited to corporate computer networks. The Ponemon Institute’s research shows that 65 percent of Internet users around the globe have been cybercrime victims, and 73 percent of Americans have suffered the effects of cybercrime–second to only China and Brazil by percentage.Part of the problem is that hackers don’t have to work particularly hard to compromise corporate and personal computer systems.
The infographic points out that 75 percent of computer users use the same password for all of their logins, and a password with six or fewer digits can take as little as 10 minutes to crack using basic software. Computer users can drastically decrease the chances of a successful security breach by upgrading to an eight-digit password and by using a mix of numbers, symbols and uppercase and lowercase letters.
