5 Ideas: Security

Malware increased by 400 percent last year, according to a study released by McAfee at the end of January, and companies may loose a combined 1 trillion dollars from cybercrimes. Where are these threats coming from? More than 40 percent of respondents said they were most concerned that laid-off employees were their biggest threat. Read on for ideas about protecting your data from threats, both inside and outside you walls.

“The best place to start is putting the sensitive information in a secure, managed and controlled environment, such as a database. The database is there to not only serve the data but also protect it. The database has extensive controls to regulate who gets access to what and how. When you put together all the capabilities provided by database security, you have data encryption, you have the auditing, you have access controls, you have data classification and labeling,and tie that into an enterprise security architecture that includes things like single-sign on and identity management , then you're on the right track.”—David Knox, author of the Oracle Database Security book

“The IOUG 2008 Data Security Survey found that while organizations continue to be concerned about IT security in general, and most support the concept of data security, few have addressed the key vulnerabilities stemming from exposure of data to internal sources.”—Director Jenny Gelhausen, Oracle Investor Relations

“For a long time, the really obvious problem was outsiders—recreational hackers and virus authors. So although there were a steady number of incidents attributable to insiders, more attention was paid to the outsider threat, which was easier to quantify and demonstrate. As a result, the most commonly used tools, such as intrusion detection, firewalls, and antivirus software, have all been outward-facing defenses.” —Professor Eugene H. Spafford, executive director of Purdue's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security

“Forty-nine percent of respondents say their data breeches involve papers.The best recommendation? DON'T LET THEM PRINT IT! If this information is so sensitive, why on earth would an organization allow users the ability to create printed copies? Oracle IRM is the perfect technology to help with this problem. It provides the ability to limit who can print documents. So you can continue to distribute the content in its native format (XLS, DOC, PDF, HTML, Emails etc) but stop people from making paper copies in the first place.”—Simon Thorpe, senior solutions consultant, Oracle IRM

“As a company we find it amazing the amount of breaches of the magnitude that are happening are still happening. We have technology that if implemented correctly with the correct best practices, stops that stuff from going on.”—Alan Bird, VP of business development at Cyber-Ark