"It's much tougher than it used to be to crack through externally-facing countermeasures," he says. "So the new tactic is to slip in on the coattails of trusted employees."
The problem is that many organizations have inadequate, or completely absent endpoint security policies and tools. While there are initiatives to plug this hole at the OS and NOS level, and a passel of products from startups, the pervasiveness of remote and mobile computing and the tardiness of organizations to adopt thorough compliance verification processes make this, in Slaby's words, "a major, coming problem."
Wireless networks: None of this is helped by the increasing prevalence of wireless networks. You just have to wander the streets of a big city like New York, opening your laptop in parks and cafes, to see how many unsecured wireless networks there are.
"Companies are pretty savvy, but it takes only one person to set up an access point," Curphey says. "Every office has a network jack and a Linksys wireless router only costs $90, or so, at Circuit City. Depending on where that access point is, it can be a big, big problem."
Indeed, Curphey says that unauthorized access point installations, where employees give themselves the greater flexibility of wireless networking, has become frighteningly common. "If it's on the corporate LAN, it bypasses the firewall and the VPN," he says. That can give network miscreants all the opportunity they need to slip in at an undocumented hotspot and wreak havoc.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
