Nearly half of US IT professionals cite security complexity as their biggest challenge, according to an Accenture/InformationWeek survey conducted in May-June 2006.
Another big battle IT professionals constantly face is making users aware of security risks and ensuring they follow security policies.
These problems have not disappeared in the past year.
The good news is that one company's loss is another's gain. According to Gartner, the worldwide security software market will reach $9.1 billion in 2007, up 10.7% over 2006 revenues of $8.2 billion. Antivirus software revenues will total $4.9 billion in 2007, accounting for 53.8% of the security software market.
In a December 2006 CIO magazine survey, security software spending was high on the list of priorities for North American IT executives.
Sophos Security reported in June 2007 that 41.1% of malware was written in China. According to the security firm, a sizable proportion of this malware was designed to steal passwords from online gamers.
The larger trend involved malware authors placing malicious software within the code of insecure Web sites, enabling them to infect the computers of those Web sites' visitors. Just such a situation happened to the Miami Dolphins site earlier in the year as the Super Bowl was approaching.
The firm uncovered 9,500 new infected Web pages daily on average in May 2007, an increase of more than 1,000 every day compared with April 2007. In total, 304,000 Web pages hosting malicious code were identified in May.
Carole Theriault of Sophos said, "The fact that malware is being found on legitimate government Web sites shows again that any organization can be hit if it is not vigilant."
