Symantec warns on public sector security

By Janet Harris

Symnantec highlights an increased threat to public sector security in the latest edition of its threat report which covers the last six months of 2006.

According to the study, a quarter of data breaches involved information held by government or its agencies. The second highest number of data breaches, 20%, affected education, with the health sector third with 14%.

Over half of the data breaches occurred due to the theft or loss of a computer or hardware such as a USB stick.

The company advises that data encryption is one of the most effective methods of maintaining security. A large number of security breaches occur while data is in transit and encrypting data would remove 50 per cent of breaches from those sources.

Governments also suffered 30% of all detected Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.