Pam O'Neal

If there’s anything scarier than the Stuxnet attack and its variants, it would have to be the rapid proliferation of mobile malware. 2011 has seen exponential growth in mobile malware, fueled by the pace of smartphone adoption. Lookout Mobile just published a mobile threat report that estimates between a half million and one million users were affected by mobile malware in the first half of 2011. The takeaway: Don’t expect to see this trend reverse in 2012. Start preparing now. Doing our part to minimize the impact of security threats, we recently added more mobility testing and SCADA testing capabilities to the BreakingPoint products.

Late last year, Enterprise Strategy Group reported that less than a third of companies in critical infrastructure industries (banking, electric utilities, etc.) conducted consistent vendor evaluations. In the SANS Institute survey on network security BreakingPoint just conducted, only 18 percent of respondents said that they have a formal testing and validation program in place to harden elements of their infrastructure against attack.

In an era of steep budget cuts for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), the objective in government circles has been to “get small” — to do more without spending more. Although some budget allocations for cybersecurity may be protected from cuts, the imperative to get small still makes sense. Smaller typically means more agile, easier to deploy widely, and, of course, less costly. This certainly holds true on the cyber range front, where those charged with cyber defense await the online training grounds they need to develop incident response and defense techniques. By investing in newer, compact, and agile cyber ranges, the DoD could deliver full Internet-scale simulation capabilities to military bases worldwide. Who says you can’t have better, faster, AND more cost-effective?