[June 16, 2011] IronKey Urges IT Security Professionals to Address Cyber Attacks Tweet Jun 16, 2011 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- IronKey announced it has urged IT security professionals to take immediate action to address increasing cyber-crime attacks. According to a release, in recent months, cyber-criminals have carried out targeted attacks on some of the world's biggest organisations. While RSA battles to save its reputation with customers, Sony is also trying to redeem itself after its online games network was compromised by a hacking attack in April. This particular attack left more than 100 million customers affected, and rendered the service offline for a month at a cost of nearly $200 million (GBP122.3 million). In addition, defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, utilities providers and the global banking system are all being targeted by cyber-criminals -- and if they are successful, the consequences are far reaching and long term -- with the potential to severely impact the global economy. So, as attacks intensify, all eyes turned to the IT security industry at last week's global summit -- in the hope that the market experts would introduce new preventative methods to tackle threats head on, in a proactive manner. But instead, industry leaders took a reactive stance, focusing instead on dealing with existing threats, protecting end-points on the network and educating users. Arthur Wong, CEO of IronKey, said, "We need a new direction for protecting data itself, moving away from failed methods like AV -- that only detect threats after they occur. The industry needs to be proactive, not reactive, and this was the missing message from last week's event." While one of the major talking points of the show was about the need to educate end users, IronKey believe that organisations can no longer expect their employees or customers to be responsible for IT security on their computing devices. Wong added, "It's time for businesses -- and the industry -- to take action, preventing threats and therefore protecting both themselves and their customer base." Wong concluded, "The products of most firms are set up to react to particular threats. But cyber-criminals are continually developing new, and more sophisticated, variants of malware and viruses. And so existing products can't react quickly enough, and certainly can't hope to be 100 per cent successful in detecting and combating new threats. IronKey is different. In fact, we're 180 degrees away from the way that the industry currently thinks. Our products assume that a system is already infected -- providing the user with a hardened virtual operating system and browser, built-in malware protection and a trusted network that together provides a separate, protected computing environment." IronKey secures data and online access for individuals, enterprises and governments. More Information: www.IronKey.com ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected])) [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]