The FBI, Department of Justice and the SANS Institute last week released the 10 most critical Internet security threats and how to eliminate them. A few of the top 10 are pretty obvious, such as educating users on secure computing techniques, including not opening unverified e-mail attachments. The group also says administrators are connecting systems to the Internet without testing security.
Managers ignore patches and updates for critical servers and desktop software packages.
Firewalls, which are complicated, seem to be a problem as well. Many misconfigure the software or do not take full advantage of its blocking capabilities. One of the things that struck me as crazy is that IT staffs are still not implementing backup and recovery plans. Backups helped Network World recover from the recent LoveLetter virus attack. Nearly all of our damaged files were recovered.