Companies More Worried About Spam Than Hackers
from the more-direct-threat dept
A new study has found that most companies are much more worried about the threat of spam than they are of hackers breaking into their network. This makes sense. In terms of likelihood of facing the problem, everyone is inundated with spam – but hackers only attack a limited number of sites (and often don’t do much damage to the sites they do hit). While the overall impact of being hit by a malicious hacker may be much worse, on an “expected cost” basis, most people are going to calculate spam to be a bigger issue. The study also found that companies are even more afraid of viruses than they are of spam (though, these days, spam and viruses seem to go hand in hand). Again, this makes sense. Almost everyone has received a virus at some point or another – and the impact of viruses (and worms) is clearly more than the actual pain of spam. So, it’s really a matter of calculating the differences between high probability, low pain (spam) against medium-to-high probability, medium-to-high pain (viruses) against low probability, medium-to-high pain (hackers). Based on actual experiences of various IT staffs, it sounds like viruses lead to the highest expected pain values.
