Security Breaches Running Rampant
May 2003
Latest research has found that security breaches across Asia have reached epidemic levels.Some 75% of developers reported at least one security breach in the last year. Of those who had breaches, two thirds had three or more security breaches. In a 2003 survey 57% reported a security breach in the last year and less than half had three or more breaches.
China experienced a sharp increase, from 59% reporting at least one security breach last year to 84% this year. Almost 60% of Chinese respondents experienced three or more breaches in the past year. China was also the most likely region to make the security breach public or to report to a security agency, 51%, India was second with 31% but Japan, 4%, and Australia/New Zealand, 2%, were the least likely.
"Not surprisingly, computer viruses are the most common breaches and more than half the breaches were viruses," said Esther Schindler, EDC senior analyst. "But 12% of Asian developers reported deliberate database hacks and 9% said they'd been the victims of unauthorized scripts. The situation is worst in China where well more than 4 out of 5 respondents experienced a breach."
Other findings from the survey of 600 developers in the Asia Pacific region:
- A third of Asian Pacific developers consider Microsoft the Web services leader. But each region has its own champion: Australia and New Zealand strongly believe in Microsoft at 53%, but in Japan respondents believe that IBM is the Web services leader and, in India, developers think Sun Microsystems will be dominant.
- APAC developers use an average of 3.8 software engineering process steps. China was the lowest at 3.1, India came in at 3.9, Japan at 4.1 and Australia/New Zealand at 4.9 steps. Only 38% of Chinese developers do acceptance testing to determine if the system is working according to specifications compared to Australian/New Zealander developers at 81%.
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