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.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
