There are a lot of easy answers to the problem of attacks on your network. You’ve heard them: “Get a new firewall,” or, “Get a better firewall like an NG firewall.” And of course always the tried and true, “If you’d configured your firewall properly, you wouldn’t have had this problem.”

The Wall Street Journal is reporting the director of the National Security Agency, Gen. Keith Alexander, is warning of potential attacks by Anonymous on the U.S. power grid sometime in the next 12 to 18 months, according to sources attending private meetings at the White House.

With recent attacks on critical infrastructure here and abroad the unspoken elephant in the room thanks to Stuxnet, the bipartisan Cybersecurity Act of 2012 was introduced late last week that would require companies to cooperate with the federal government to reinforce their network defenses.

On average any given website is probed by hackers 18 times an hour. And that's good news -- last year, sites were probed an average of 27 times per hour. But the bad news is once hackers decide to attack, they launch on average 38,000 attacks an hour, or roughly 10 attacks a second -- up from 27,000 attacks per hour recorded in January 2011.

Managing IT security can be a thankless job in more ways than one, especially given the size of the task at hand. To really figure out what is happening and when it's happening, IT security managers must sift through massive amounts of systems log data.