India’s IT Security Widely Cleaved, Survey Highlights

The leading content protection and Web security firm, Websense Inc., has declared the results of the SOS (State of Security) survey done in India. domain-b published this in news on February 12, 2008.

Websense commissioned the survey conducted by The Nielsen Company, India. The survey was meant to assess the Internet's impact during work time, and measures employees' awareness about risks and security on the Internet.

The study highlights that Internet security is the key problem to BFSI, i.e., Banking, Financial and Insurance Services and the IT-BPO sectors. One more disturbing trend found in the survey is that despite security systems and solutions properly deployed, 49% of company employees find spam mails in their official inboxes. This means many corporate e-mail addresses can be found on the Web.

The Nielsen Company, India, monitored approximately 316,338 Website visits that could result in a security problem to companies' sites when employees visit them. Various categories which agency has identified as big security threats include keyloggers, spyware, fraudulent and phishing sites, and unwanted software and freeware downloads. Therefore, according to security analysts, threats are increasingly getting sophisticated and conventional security solutions are evading security techniques.

According to Regional Director Surendra Singh of SAARC, Websense Inc., the results of the survey primarily suggest that a greater part of the company workforce today surf on the Internet for an extended time during work hours while a majority of them remain unaware of online security threats, as reported by domain-b on February 12, 2008.

Security Analyst and Country Manager, Niraj Kaushik, Trend Micro, India, said that conventionally, security software applied the system of whitelist and blacklist to deal with security problems. But this category does not include certain dark regions that require to be dealt with. Kaushik said that Trend Micro has been addressing risk levels both on the Web as well as on e-mail servers, as reported by Business Standard on February 8, 2008.

Apart from these types of security risks at private enterprises, IDC, another market intelligence organization, has detected some prime Web-based trends waiting to be addressed to tackle security threats. These include blended Web threats, Web 2.0 technologies, and prevention of data loss.

Related article: India Remains an Easy Target for Hackers in '06

» SPAMfighter News - 2/19/2008