The US Department of Homeland Security announced that October has been declared Cyber-Security Awareness Month. At the same time, Internet and computer security firm McAfee released a study documenting executive management's lack of awareness of cyber-vulnerabilities in their own business data centers and web hosting facilities.
Cyber-Security Awareness Month promotes the themes "Our Shared Responsibility" and “Protect Yourself Before You Connect Yourself” by listing some simple steps everyone can to take to prevent cyber-space threats from overwhelming the country and the world. These steps fall in the categories of:
- ways to safeguard information and devices under your purview
- approaches to take when responding to cyber-threats
- relationship of the individual to critical national cyber-infrastructure
The focus is acknowledging that improvement in the area of computer security is now an absolute requirement for everyone.
On the flip side of cyber-security awareness, a recent study from McAfee confirms what many people have feared. McAffee and the Gabriel Consulting Group affirm that executive managers of enterprise-wide IT departments are guilty of a serious disconnect between their perceptions of what security they think is in place versus the cyber-security actually implemented at their data centers.
Only 22% of the IT mangers surveyed report that their executive management is fully aware of the preparedness measures in place to combat cyber-threats. Cloud computing and virtualization, both mainstays of web hosting functions, are not given the particular attention needed to implement customized security measures, despite the fact that over half of the IT mangers agree that measures for these two areas must be markedly different than the same old computer security -- over 40% of the IT managers reported that they were using the same types of security measures for virtual computing as they use for physical data center security.
But, these statistics do indicate that IT is aware of the problem -- over 70% of the IT managers report uneasiness and skepticism over the general security of the public cloud. But, even more so, the prevalent feeling among these IT managers is that their executive management sees cyber-security as reactive to actual incidents rather than preventive. And they judge their own company's reactive response to be inadequate -- over 40% says day-to-day security does not met their company's own documented standards.
Take a look at your own company and decide whether this month should be dedicated to Cyber-Security Awareness -- or Unawareness.
