Many companies` focus lies too heavily on external attacks, largely due to the media hype that surrounds them, but security vendors agree that internal attacks can be far more damaging and corporations need to better monitor their staff.
Latest Deloitte research shows that internal attacks rose from 35% in 2005 to 49% in 2006.
"Internal attacks pose a much bigger threat than external ones, because they can be explicitly targeted," explains Richard Archdeacon, director of innovation enterprise, Europe, Middle East and Africa, at Symantec. "The use of policies and behaviour-based technology is incremental in this sense."
John Mc Loughlin, MD of J2 Software, believes companies focus too heftily on blocking attacks externally, but the biggest threat to their information could well be sitting inside their own firewalls. He believes the answer lies in policies and monitoring.
"Failure to monitor staff can cause loss of productivity, bandwidth compromise, storage issues and legal implications for companies," he explains. "And let`s not forget the huge security implications that can arise.
"Take one of the latest banking fraud scams where two customers were compromised from the same organisation - the attack was internal. We see more and more of this happening every day," he concludes.
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