Seventy per cent of hackers come from within the organisation being attacked. With the doom and gloom merchants out in force, arguing that the UK economy is teetering on the brink of recession, the threats to information security are more potent than ever. Private data is now travelling on a public network,' says Cobb. In the US, everybody has. Unlike 10 years ago, just about everybody in a company knows how to use a computer.
Companies deploy the technology before it's secure, then have to go back and make it secure.
Add to this the mass shift to distributed computing and it means that system vulnerabilities are no longer limited to a central mainframe, presenting more points of attack for corporate enemies. Once e-commerce starts to take off, the security stumbling blocks which surround it will leave firms and customers even more vulnerable. More than half of the companies polled admit they lack confidence that their systems would withstand a hacking attack. He believes the outlook is bleaker still. Out of 50 assessments over the past 18 months, 'the number of systems we've failed to penetrate is zero', says Cobb.