Half of businesses suffered worm outbreaks


According to a survey released earlier in the week by Mazu Networks and the Enterprise Strategy Group, 47% of the poll's respondents admitted that their computer systems had been infected by some sort of worm or other piece of malicious code. Almost 25% suffered an internal breach. Two out of five of these breaches resulted in the interruption of a critical service.

"I think this is a bit of a wake-up call," said Tom Corn, vice president of marketing for Mazu Networks. "Not a lot of folks have confidence that they have mechanisms and processes in place to protect themselves." Corn went on to suggest that the threats are becoming more focused, more intent on extracting cash through fraud and identity theft. Even more ominously, there appears to be attempts to take over large systems of computers to accomplish ambitiously nefarious ends. "We are starting to see a lot of these threats less for bragging rights and more about creating armies of system zombies and bots--there is a strong financial model for that," Corn said.

What if some group or nation with a fanatical desire to do in the Western Civilization developed what amounted to a sort of sleeper worm that merely infected computers but didn't do anything, just sat there waiting for an appointed time when it would go berserk, causing all manner of mischief to the computer infrastructure of Western nations? Could such an event cause an already ailing economy to collapse? How vulnerable is our computer infrastructure, anyway?

Posted: Fri - March 25, 2005 at 05:15 PM          

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