McAfee CEO: Cybercrime Bigger Than Drug Trade
In a keynote address to the InformationWeek 500 conference, McAfee CEO David DeWalt summarized the state of cybercrime and the security market, including something of a wake up call:
DeWalt said "it's amazing how low the awareness is of cyber-security threats" among both government officials and corporate executives. "As the world has flattened, we've seen a significant amount of emerging threats from increasingly sophisticated groups attacking organizations around the world."
and
Citing recent highly publicized corporate data breaches that have beset major companies like Ameritrade, Citigroup, and Bank of America, DeWalt said that cyber-crime has become a US$105 billion business that now surpasses the value of the illegal drug trade worldwide.
DeWalt also cited five trends in the security industry:
1. Industry consolidation, both among vendors and tools leading to a more unified threat management techniques
2. The continued presence of government regulation and the need to maintain compliance
3. The move to protect data at its source and not just at the perimeter.
4. New challenges arising from the widespread adoption of virtualization
5. New platforms and devices
I'd add to number 3 the need for more focus on database security in particular. IBM researchers found Oracle to be number 3 in the list of top vulnerable vendors (see more at an earlier post). We definitely need to close down the access to databases from vulnerable applications but databases must be secure in themselves. We can't count on other developers to protect the crown jewels of the organization.
By the way, for more on Oracle security, check out the podcast on Oracle security for Web devlopers.
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