A company specializing in enterprise security solutions said yesterday that ways in protecting the enterprise is now experiencing a paradigm shift.

At the 6th Annual Philippine Information Technology Security Conference and Exhibit, called ManilaCon 2k7, Sam Ghebranious, regional director, Asean, Lumension Security, said two components are now converging, namely operations security.

“These two components are now converging, and the enterprise should have the capability to combat several cyber-security challenges,” he said.

He cited IT infrastructure vulnerabilities as one. According to the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) 2006 index, a US government repository of standards-based vulnerability management data, 24 new vulnerabilities are released per day, and 12.5 out of the 24 are considered serious enough for the IT staff to address each day based on the same worldwide index.

Statistics released by the CERT Program, a government-funded research and development center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, USA, show around 3,097 vulnerabilities were already reported during the first half of the year.

Ghebranious also said that thousands of hacking tools now proliferate in cyberspace. According to Gartner, over 90 percent of cyber attacks exploit known security flaws. “However, it is good to note that despite the proliferation of attacks, more remedies are also now available,” he added.

Even data leakage is now becoming a serious issue. Ghebranious noted many Fortune 1000 companies have become victims of data leakage. Affected companies have incurred huge financial losses due to virus attacks and unauthorized access to networks, lost or stolen passwords, and theft of proprietary information.

With the convergence of operations and security, more enterprises are now giving importance to business operations. He said corporate risk is also becoming a business issue, considering the rising value of transmitted and stored data, and the increasing sophistication of attackers.             

“We are now driven by a policy-based business today. We will also see the increase of regulatory and software compliance efforts, particularly in banks and other organizations in the financial services industry,” Ghebranious added.

Lumension’s solutions, which employ patch management, security configuration management, device control, application control, network access control, and disk encryption as part of an overall approach, can help mitigate risks by using policy-based processes that mitigates problems before they occur. “It’s basically having a proactive rather than reactive approach,” he said.

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A company specializing in enterprise security solutions said yesterday that ways in protecting the enterprise is now experiencing a paradigm shift.

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