Two-fifths of these were described as having a serious impact on the business. Secure Computing's recently unveiled Zero-hour Attack Protection (ZAP) Technology for the Sidewinder G2 Security Appliance can solve the problem as it stops zero-hour attacks automatically without having to wait for anti-virus or IPS signature updates. Secure Computing Corporation are experts in securing connections between people, applications, and networks.
ZAP technology is based upon the positive security model, which allows only legitimate network traffic and denies everything else. "Negative model" security technologies like IPS gateways are extremely useful, but they allow everything through the gateway unless they recognise known viruses and attacks. The positive security model is therefore superior at preventing unknown attacks because it automatically eliminates exposure to many types of attacks-unknown as well as known. ZAP technology combines over 200,000 attack signatures with a positive security model for maximum protection.
The report also found that one-fifth of the companies questioned in the survey said that they do not update signature files (used to protect against viruses) within a day. Also Virus infections tended to take more effort to resolve than other incidents sometimes taking over 50 days' work to fix.
The survey showed that virus infections were more likely to have caused service interruption than other incidents. Usually the disruption was minor but roughly a quarter of companies questioned who reported a virus as their worst incident had major disruption, with important services such as email down for more than a day.
"Defending against new zero-hour attacks and rapidly emerging attack variants that are continually released before patches or attack signatures are available is one of the greatest challenge facing the security industry today is," said Andy Philpott, VP EMEA at Secure Computing. "The most effective way to defend against this accelerating threat is to deploy products based on the positive model of threat mitigation such as the Sidewinder G2 Security Appliance with ZAP technology."

The Department of Trade and Industry's biennial Information Security Breaches Survey is conducted by a consortium led by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. The full results of the survey were launched at Infosecurity Europe at the end of April.