Six top security issues for executives

Computerworld - Sun Tzu, a legendary Chinese strategist born more than 2,000 years ago, taught the importance of knowing both your enemy and yourself:
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
-- Sun Tzu, in The Art of War, Chapter 3, Verse 18
Truer words were never spoken when it comes to information security. To succeed, you must know your enemy as well as your own strengths and weaknesses. The following are six issues of which executives should be aware to protect their systems.
1. Know Your Enemy
The faceless external attacker often plays the villain role in the traditional information-security drama. While such external attackers exist and are a real threat, internal misuse presents a much greater risk and must not be ignored. To truly know your enemy, you must consider and understand both external and internal threats.
2. Understand External Enemies
By definition, external enemies attempt to attack you from outside your corporate boundaries. These attackers may be teenagers in their parents' basements, miscreants in other countries or credit card thieves, among others. External enemies attack your enterprise for various reasons; some are more malicious than others.
Many external attackers resemble joy riders who steal cars for the fun of it. These attackers target your network to show off their skills and expertise to their peers. While they often have little malicious intent, they can cause vast amounts of damage to your systems.
Politics motivate other external attackers. They may want to deface your public Web site and use it as a venue for their political messages. Such political defacements occur relatively frequently, numbering in the hundreds per year.
Other motivations include theft, fraud, corporate espionage and even cyberterrorism. External attackers must be clever to infiltrate your perimeter defenses, but experience has shown that such infiltration is possible and, in some cases, even easy.
The external threat includes individual attackers manually probing and penetrating your networks, as well as highly automated attacks such as worm programs. For example, the Code Red worm attacked and compromised hundreds of thousands of hosts around the world in a matter of hours. Skilled attackers can create such worm programs with little effort. The threat from worms continues to grow, and protecting your systems against them is crucial.
3. Defend Against Internal Enemies