-- PAGE 7 --

<< previous page next page >>

Network Security Measurements

An ever-increasing number of people are studying, working and entertaining through networks, meaning a corresponding increase in opportunities to attack them, including attacks exploiting weaknesses in client machines and ones exploiting weaknesses on servers or on networks. Terminal computers face challenges from Trojans, Worms, Viruses, spyware, malware and other malicious software. And, numerous attacking tools are available widely on the Internet for download and modification, for attacks which can be generated by anyone with only a basic understanding of a computer network.

It is worth mentioning that these problems are further exacerbated by the volume of different vulnerabilities that have been discovered and the time lag between discovery and disclosure. Speed of disclosure is of the essence here, since the speed with which security issues spread through networks is now counted in minutes rather than hours or days (See table 1)

Table 1: Worm Virus Impact upon the Global Network

Since CERT² started tracking vulnerability numbers in 1995, more than 34,000 vulnerabilities have been reported and cataloged. These numbers have been almost doubling each year since 1999³ (See figure 5 below).

Figure 5: Network security vulnerability chart

-- PAGE 7 --

<< previous page next page >>

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | Page 6 | Page 7 | Page 8 | Page 9 | Page 10 | Page 11 | Page 12 | Glossary | References

Notes:

2 CERT ORG. 2007 [online]. [1 Aug 2007]. Available from World Wide Web : http://www.cert.org/stats/cert_stats.html

3 CERT ORG.2007 [online]. [3 Aug 2007]. Available from World Wide Web : http://www.cert.org/stats/fullstats.html

Xuhua Ji, September 2007

(You are free to reproduce any of the information in this article or part thereof, so long as the byline remains intact and a link is provided back to this page)

    add to del.icio.us

Comment on this article >>