Top Global Threats for Q4 2011 Identified - Slide 11

The proper security tools can prevent infection or stop outbreaks, mitigate or reduce losses from malicious events, and even decrease legal liability. These products can also often serve as an excellent source of information about what is happening in your enterprise. Regular review and understanding of the logs produced by these tools and services can enable you to benchmark what is normal and typical for your enterprise, which in turn provides a benchmark to spot unusual or atypical behavior that might indicate an advanced persistent threat or other intrusion.

Correlating log information across various tools and services also provides a timely “pulse” of the threat landscape, which can sometimes have interesting associations to global non-malware-related events. Most importantly, regular review and understanding of the data can help uncover the elusive “black swan” — the types of surreptitious and malicious events that otherwise could fly below the radar.

The Cisco Global Threat Report is a compilation of data collected across four core segments of Cisco Security: ScanSafe, Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), Remote Management Services (RMS), and IronPort. The report is published quarterly in the hopes that it will inspire and motivate you to perform your own in-house analysis on an ongoing basis.