The News General DM News Over a third of US government IT execs say systems have been targeted by data thieves
19 November 2009
Over a third of senior IT executives at US federal agencies say their networks have been attacked at least once by data thieves in the last 12 months, with new technologies around Web 2.0 and mobile working set to make the situation worse.
A CA sponsored survey conducted by the security research focused Ponemon Institute found that 35% of respondents said their department’s networks had been "victimised by an unauthorised infiltrator one or more times over the past 12 months". Another 38% were unsure about possible unauthorised intrusions.
The survey, "Cyber Security Mega Trends: Study of IT leaders in the US federal government", questioned 217 senior-level IT executives employed by various US federal agencies. The survey sought to identify significant areas of risk to information security associated with government efforts to adopt new technologies, such as cloud computing, virtualisation, mobile devices, and Web 2.0 tools such as collaboration and social networking applications, blogs and wikis.
As the UK government seeks to adopt similar technology to save money and increase citizen participation in government affairs, the findings of the US survey should be of interest here.
The US survey found that 79% of federal government IT executives saw the rise in the use of collaboration tools as significantly increasing the storage of unstructured data sources that contain confidential or sensitive information "that is not adequately protected or secured".
In addition, 63% see the mobility of the government workforce as contributing significantly to endpoint security risks, as a result of a plethora of insecure mobile data-bearing devices that are susceptible to malware infections and botnet attacks.
The survey also found that 52% saw Web 2.0 applications, such as social networking, social messaging, blogging and wikis, as contributing to the leakage of confidential or sensitive information, as well as to the susceptibility to malware and botnet attacks.
Other threats to the national infrastructure included virtualisation technologies (44%), cloud computing (39%), outsourcing to third-parties (34%), and the use of open source applications (18%).
“Many federal agencies are moving to take advantage of the efficiencies made possible by today’s technological innovations in order to save time and money, but those improvements must not be made without consideration to the threats to information security,” said Larry Ponemon, chairman of the Ponemon Institute.
