The local IT industry needs to move away from simply reacting to security threats and take a proactive approach by implementing intelligent management security systems.
This is according to Craig Hockley, McAfee regional director for SA and sub-Saharan Africa. “We saw more viruses in 2011 than seen in the past 10 years combined. We are now seeing 70 000 new viruses emerging per day.”
McAfee predicts that, in 2012, we will see an aggressive increase in attacks against embedded systems. Critical infrastructure attacks are going to be much more prevalent this year than previous years, says Hockley.
“We are picking up a lot of these kinds of attacks at the moment, as hackers test the defences of large corporates, banks and governments. We saw a lot more visible attacks in the last six months.
“Hackers are also starting to understand that if they can compromise the big data centres and get into servers, [then] they can compromise multiple organisations that are being hosted. And we've got to ensure that hosted service providers understand the different threats that are out there and protect themselves holistically against these threats.”
According to Hockley, educating the South African and sub-Saharan African markets on security threats will be a key priority for McAfee this year. The security vendor sees big business growth coming from network security as well as security management.
“This year, we want to focus on that part of the market, helping customers proactively build security management solutions to reduce pressure on internal staff, cut costs and become more responsive to the security threat landscape.”
Hockley says McAfee will also be increasingly addressing the public sector market as government takes information security more seriously. He notes that McAfee is engaging with a large number of public sector departments and is working with its channel partners.
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