Managing information technology security in the context of cyber crime trends

Abstract

Cyber-attacks can significantly hurt an organization's IT environment, leading to serious operational disruptions, from simply damaging the first layers of IT security up to identity theft, data leakage and breaking down networks. Moreover, the dangers through which current cybercrimes practices affect organizations present a tendency of developing more rapidly that decision makers can assess them and find countermeasures. Because cyber threats are somewhat new thus a critical source of risks, within the context of the constantly changing IT environments (e.g. cloud services integration) organizations may not effectively implement and manage cyber threat risk assessment processes. This paper highlights the importance of designing effective security strategies and proactively addressing cybercrime issues as key elements within the organizational risk management approaches. Malware rises constantly in impact and complexity and has surpassed the traditional security model. One of the main ideas of the study is to present the main areas of risks related to cyber security to which an organization is subject to and provide a baseline of an analysis model that would adequately evaluate input data, rank priorities and represent the results and solutions to decrease these risks. The importance of this study is to increase awareness efforts and to highlight the critical importance of using the full extent of resources provided. Each member of an organization has a significant role in decreasing the exposure to the vulnerabilities created by cyber-attacks. © 2006-2013 by CCC Publications.