Those are excellent questions. But the answer must include, "How much did it cost 'them'?", who did go down. For this, you need contacts of others in your similar situation, such as this group. And out of however many you know, how many of those others were affected? To gauge the probability of you being hit. Basically, your guesses won't work as justification. You need hard data. And if you are already running security software, you must be able to quantify its effect. This is why we and so many others are spending the effort to produce all these nice graphs and correlated data, to make it easier for you to prove to your boss why it was important to have our software. The thing about the security business is that the best result is when no one notices anything. But if no one notices anything, were you actually doing anything? When I asked recently about which viruses you caught, I got a small number of replies. Perhaps, many of you had that information and didn't feel comfortable sharing it with me. That is what I hope. Because if you can't produce that information for your boss, you'll soon be out of a budget. Jimmy -----Original Message----- From: Jere Retzer [mailto:retzerj@private] Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2002 8:25 AM To: crime@private Subject: CRIME Security Justification Seth made some excellent points in his post. Attacks are more or less random so I would not count on protection from a low profile. Some questions to ask yourself: - What would it cost us if our network were down for a day? A week? - What would it cost us to lose our Internet access for the same time frames? - What would it cost us if we lost our e-mail access for these time frames? - Do we have any critical information on any of our computers that are connected to the network that we cannot afford to lose, have exploited or changed, or publicized? - What would be the damage to our reputation if our systems were found to be a breeding ground or launching point for attacks on others? Then tailor your security accordingly I personally believe that even home users who have 'always on' service like DSL or cable modems should have at least a rudimentary firewall, virus protection and backup their data off line
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