Losses due to security breaches and application failures that result in theft of data, service downtime and brand damage now stretch into the tens of millions of dollars per year for large enterprises, according to Infonetics Research1. Attacks and failures are seen at every level – from online applications, to networks, to mobile and core infrastructures.
IP Security Analysis
to Minimize Network Security Threats
P/N 915-2208-01 Rev B January, 2009ContentsIntroduction...............................................................................................2
The Need for Preemptive Security..............................................................5
The Payoff.................................................................................................6
Security Analysis Test Requirements...........................................................7
Applicability....................................................................................................... 7
Stateful operation................................................................................................ 7
Tool usage.......................................................................................................... 9
Repeatability.................................................................................................... 10
IxDefendT - Preemptive Security Analysis..............................................10
The Ixia Advantage..................................................................................12
Conclusion...............................................................................................13
References...............................................................................................13IntroductionLosses due to security breaches and application failures that result in theft of data, service down-time and brand damage now stretch into the tens of millions of dollars per year for large enter-prises, according to Infonetics Research1. Attacks and failures are seen at every level - from online applications, to networks, to mobile and core infrastructures.
Figure 1. Costs related to security flaws
Conventional security software and appliances, such as anti-virus protection and firewalls, have increasingly reduced the number of attacks, but the total losses continue to grow. The 2008 CSI Computer Crime and Security Survey2 reports that in 2007 the average loss per survey respon-dent was just under $300,000.
2
2Economic and competitive pressures have led enterprises and government agencies to make busi-ness assets and sensitive information accessible through IP networks. Enterprises and government agencies, in particular, have converted from frame relay networks and other private networks to public, IP-based networks for reasons of price and convenience.
Enterprises and government agencies are increasingly combining existing commercial and open source software, servers, and converged networks and systems to provide new services to their customers. Today's enterprise infrastructures consist of hundreds, if not thousands of servers. Each hardware and software component has unknown quality, robustness and security. When com-bined through standard and proprietary interfaces, the risks associated with each component are multiplied.
With considerable time-to-market pressure and the lack of trained security staff, thorough security and robustness assessment - the ability of a system to handle unexpected input - is often omitted. This results in applications and systems that are insecure and fragile, leaving organizations open to the very real and expensive risks associated with:
. Brand damage. Service degradation. Downtime. Legal exposure
The costs associated with brand damage can be bad and potentially fatal for a company. "Any breach has the tendency to dampen greatly whatever you are spending around your brand," says Kirk Herath, chief privacy officer, assistant vice president and associate general counsel at Nationwide Insurance in Columbus, Ohio.3
"Customers will churn if they feel a company can't secure their data," says Larry Ponemon, founder of the Ponemon Institute, a research firm specializing in privacy and information manage-ment practices. "The customer translates bad data practices as lack of respect and thus may lose confidence" in any organization that can't keep information safe.3
Service degradation is a hard to measure quantity, but can be very expensive. Services that are poorly engineered fail to scale well. This results in unhappy customers who experience delays while using web sites, or the need for more and more hardware to compensate for the degrada-tion. A s... [download for more]
