Microsoft Cybersecurity Report: Top 10 Most Wanted Enterprise Threats

In my travels abroad over the years, I have had the great opportunity to meet with many enterprise customers to discuss the evolving threat landscape.  In addition to helping inform customers, these meetings have provided me with an opportunity to learn more about how customers are managing risk within their environments.   Many of these customers are interested in learning about the top threats found in enterprise environments.  Visibility into what threats are most common in enterprise environments helps organizations assess their current security posture and better prioritize their security investments.  Given the high level of interest in this information, I thought it would be helpful to take a close look at the top 10 threats facing enterprise customers based on new intelligence from the latest Microsoft Security Intelligence Report (SIRv15). 

The latest report found that in the enterprise environment, on average about 11% of systems encountered malware, worldwide between the third quarter of 2012 (3Q12) and the second quarter of 2013 (2Q13).  The “encounter rate” is defined as the percentage of computers running Microsoft real-time security software that report detecting malware - typically resulting in a blocked installation of malware. This is different from the number of systems that actually get infected with malware, a measure called computers cleaned per mille (CCM).  Read more