ITIC Reports & Surveys

The Bring Your Own Device trend has created a security “Achilles Heel” for a 56% majority of organizations that have no response plan in place to deal with lost, stolen or hacked BYOD notebooks, tablets and smart phones. And 56% of organizations also acknowledge they are not fortifying their existing security measures, taking extra precautions or implementing security training despite recent high profile security attacks against Fortune 1000 firms like Adobe, Reuters, Target, Skype, Snapchat and others.

Equally alarming is that 50% of companies concede their corporate and employee-owned BYOD and mobile devices may have been hacked without their knowledge in the last 12 months, consequently leaving their datacenter servers and mission critical applications vulnerable to internal and external security breaches. Anecdotal evidence obtained from first person customer interviews indicates that 75% of IT and security managers are now lobbying executive management to construct mobile and BYOD-specific security policies to plug potential vulnerabilities.

Those are among the top findings of the ITIC/KnowBe4 “2014 State of Corporate Server, Desktop and BYOD Security Trends Survey.” The joint independent Web-based survey polled 300+ organizations in February 2014 on a wide range of issues including the organization’s approach to security; the biggest security threats and challenges facing their firms and the company’s preparedness to recognize and react to potential breaches. …

ITIC/KnowBE4 Security Survey: 56% of Corporations have no Proactive Response Plan to Deal with BYOD Security HacksRead More »

IBM AIX v7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Highest Security Marks

Nine out of 10 — 90% — of the 470 respondents to ITIC’s 2010-2011 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Reliability survey rated the security of Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 R2 and IBM’s AIX v7 as “Excellent” or “Very Good.” This was the highest security ratings out of 18 different Server Operating System distributions (See Exhibit below). Three-quarters or 75% of survey participants gave HP UX 11i v3 “Excellent” or “Very Good” security ratings; this was the third highest ranking of the 18 major server OS distributions polled. This was followed by Ubuntu Server 10 and Debian GNU/Linux 5, which tied for fourth. Seven out of 10 survey participants — 71% — of those polled ranked the two most popular open source distributions’ security as “Excellent” or “Very Good.” Red Hat Enterprise Linux v 5.5 and Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise 11, the two most widely deployed Linux distributions trailed Debian and Ubuntu but were nearly tied with each other in security rankings. Just over two-thirds — 67% — of Red Hat users rated its security as “Excellent or Very Good” while 66% of survey participants judging Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise 11 security to be “Excellent” or “Very Good.”

Some 58% of Apple Mac OS X 10.6 survey respondents rated its security as “Excellent” or “Very Good,” putting it at the bottom of the pack, beating only Oracle’s Solaris 10 which was rated “Excellent” or “Very Good” by 63% of respondents, which in the past two years has been notching modest gains among corporate users.

Also noteworthy was the fact that only a very small percentage of respondents gave thumbs down “Poor” or “Unsatisfactory” security grades to their server operating system vendors. In this category, Apple had the highest percentage of respondents – 7% — who gave its Mac OS X 10.6 both “Poor” and “Unsatisfactory” marks. This might appear puzzling to some since Apple’s users have long touted the security of the platform. Apple users have long boasted about the fact that there are far fewer viruses and malicious code written targeting Macs compared to Windows. However, now that Apple is once again re-emerging as a significant presence in corporate networks, the Mac OS X 10.6 will no longer enjoy the “security by obscurity” that it claimed as a standalone consumer OS. Macs, iPhones, iPads and tablets are becoming mainstream staples as business tools. Hence, the number of exploits, including such malware as worms, Trojans and bots that target the Mac is increasing commensurately. Apple will have to respond accordingly with tighter security. …

ITIC 2011 Reliability Survey: Users Give IBM AIX v7, Windows Server 2008 R2 Highest Security MarksRead More »