While most of the focus on cybercrime these days has been on financially motivated attacks,  “hactivism” has re-emerged as the primary motivation behind distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

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.

For all the concerns about cybercrime and digital espionage the threat that can do the most harm to any organization is the one that comes from inside. It doesn’t take much these days for a disgruntled employee to become motivated enough to share valuable business information with outsiders. Whether it’s for revenge or profit, most IT organizations are not really prepared to prevent that leak from happening or identify the source of that leak once it happens.

For many IT organizations, the management of firewalls today is a slow, painful process. The rules these firewalls rely on generally were put in place years ago, and subsequent firewall administrators have been loath to change them for fear of making things worse. To make matters more interesting, security administrators now find themselves trying to manage multiple firewalls from different vendors, all of which come with their own arcane management console.