Security Event Management (SEM) with CEP (Part 3) - Trends in Cyber Attacks, Threats and Vulnerabilities
Life in our web browser-based world is more dangerous than first meets the eye.*** I don’t mention this to sound the alarm bells.* It is, however, important to understand why organizations need sophisticated event-driven cybertools to catch criminals before they do harm to us.* For example,* look at the next two*charts from IBM*that show critical vulnerabilities for Internet Explorer (34 total)*and Firefox (64 total) in 2006.

The two charts above are just two examples of the unseen*daily risks we face*while*working*and playing in cyberspace - and the risk increases daily as our lives become more dependent on the net, as illustrated by the graphic below.

We can easily see from IBM’s graphic (superimposed with my curve)*that the number of cyberspace vulnerabilities*have been*increasing exponentially since 2000.* This trend continues today and is expected to get worse.*** This was the motivation for my 2000 CACM paper on next generation intrusion detection systems (which also applies to fraud detection as well as other detection-oriented event processing applications).**
Security event management*is an*event-driven* set of technologies envisioned*to make our lives more secure in cyberspace.** In my next post in the series, Security Event Management (SEM) with CEP (Part 4), I will discuss the promise of SEM and SEM functionality.* I will then explain why current SEM implementations fall far short of the earlier SEM hype and how CEP can help.

Copyright © 2007 by Tim Bass, All Rights Reserved.