Like the England football team crashing out of the World Cup on penalties, stories about inadequate security in enterprise networks are entirely predictable in summer months that offer little else in the way of networking technology news to catch the attention.

Most tales of protective impotence are perpetuated by security vendors themselves, eager to embarrass or coerce network managers into applying more effort to the task of fixing the perceived problem or play on the boardroom’s consternation to get the financial juices flowing.

Fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) aside, there is no denying that some companies might have a network security problem. The crucial point is that these companies tend to be a minority that a) have data that must be protected by law, and/or b) whose primary business activities rely on networks, systems and applications, and who therefore stand to lose thousands of pounds for each minute these crucial IT resources are disrupted by viruses, denial-of-service attacks or other downtime-inducing terrors.

As for wireless security, historical problems with traffic interception have largely been addressed by WPA, 802.1x and other protective mechanisms, as long as companies remember to implement them and turn them on.

These days, wireless security problems are more to do with mobile security issues. Employees equipped with wireless-enabled devices are still prone to going walkabout and leaving them somewhere silly, such as the back of a cab, on a train seat or on a café table, where the systems can be picked up and have their data accessed by somebody who really shouldn’t be party to the information.

So contrary to what many people appear to believe, it is not the fact that information is vulnerable during wireless transmission that should concern companies; rather, it is the age-old problem of unauthorised individuals obtaining access to data stored on a physical device.

Which, much like the England football team’s less-than-spectacular performance, is probably more of management problem. 

 martin_courtney@vnu.co.uk