A huge percentage of the applications being built these days rely on previously existing components that developers stitch together to make a new application. In fact, the vast majority of these components are open source projects that developers assume to be secure given the peer review process that most open source projects are based on.

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.

There’s no better example of how much IT security is still considered an afterthought than the whole shift to agile application development. In theory, agile application development is a major business boon because it dramatically increases the rate at which new application and follow-on updates are delivered.