Cisco’s 2014 Annual Security Report claims that as governments, organisations and IT industry as a whole is failing to cope with the ever increasing number of cyber attacks and security breaches, there is severe shortage of more than a million security professionals globally.
The report reveals that 2013 was the year which saw the highest number of threats and vulnerabilities since 2000 and the gaping shortage of security professionals is impacting organisations’ abilities to monitor and secure their networks and infrastructures from attacks.
“Most organizations do not have the people or the systems to continuously monitor extended networks and detect infiltrations, and then apply protections, in a timely and effective manner”, notes Cisco in a press release.
The report also notes that the rapid growth of mobile devices that are both intelligent and capable of processing data along with cloud computing has greatly enhanced the attack surface for cyber criminals.
New classes of devices and new infrastructure architectures offer attackers opportunities to exploit unanticipated weaknesses and inadequately defended assets.
Some of the key findings in the report are: increase in severity and volume of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, increase in use of multipurpose Trojans, continued use of Java vulnerabilities to distribute malware, increasing number of malware on Android, and increased usage of cloud services by cyber criminals to evade detection and distribute their malware.
You can download the 2014 Annual Security Report here.
