UK companies worry over viruses
Infection by viruses was the biggest single cause of the worst security incidents for UK companies in the past two years, accounting for roughly half of them, a new survey shows.
Two-fifths of these were described as having a serious impact on the business, according to findings from the 2006 Department of Trade and Industry’s biennial Information Security Breaches Survey, conducted by a consortium led by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
The research showed that virus infections were more likely to have caused service interruption than other incidents.
Usually the disruption was minor but roughly a quarter of companies questioned who reported a virus as their worst incident had major disruption, with important services such as email down for more than a day.
The majority of UK businesses surveyed have a broadband link to the Internet (88 per cent) and as a result, the threat from malicious software such as viruses has never been greater.