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The IT threat landscape has changed from one where individual glory-seeking hackers work to see how many network operations they can disrupt to one where organized crime makes a concerted and financially motivated effort to silently steal confidential information from specific organizations. Ignoring traditional IT perimeter defenses, this new breed of hackers enters networks though the backdoor, frequently hitching rides on laptops, tunneling into the network through VPN connections opened by remote users, sneaking in via smartphones, or hijacking instant messaging sessions. Once on the inside, they employ complex, stealthy crimeware methods to collect passwords, credit card information, bank account numbers, customer records, or any other type of information that they can profit from. The true goal of these new attacks is to gain unauthorized access to your systems and information on an ongoing basis.
For organizations, not only is the threat of information theft real, but there is also a real impact on the organization with every successful infection. When spyware or adware infects the endpoints, end users see their system speed and productivity grind to a slow pace. Help desks are inundated with support calls from unhappy users that can't access information or run business-critical applications. Worst of all, IT administrators don't have enough time and staff to continually track down, quarantine, and repair infected endpoints.
These new and sophisticated types of threats and attacks require new levels of protection on an organization's client systems. While antivirus technology can play an important role in the defense, it must be joined by a coordinated, multilayered defense that includes proactive vulnerability-based intrusion prevention, file-based intrusion prevention, and inbound and outbound traffic control.
The new threat landscape
Only a few years ago the majority of threats to the well-being of an organization's computing infrastructure came from glory-seeking hackers that simply wanted to impress their friends. Virus and worm authors unleashed their creations with a shotgun approach in an attempt to hit as many targets as possible. They typically didn't care who suffered from their attacks as long as the results were disruptive and readily noticeable to the world. In many ways, being hit by such an attack was like being tagged by graffiti?highly visible and a nuisance, albeit sometimes an expensive nuisance.
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