Today, in a Forbes Q&A article, Websense CIO Jim Haskin discusses the current threat landscape and how to minimize enterprise risk.

 As connectivity increases, businesses worldwide are battling to keep their data safe. Jim discusses the latest attack vectors, challenges associated with the insider threat and tips for safeguarding data. Below are two Q&A excerpts from the article:

“Is the number of attacks rising?

They're definitely going up. The attack vector has moved to the Web and the speed of change is phenomenal. A few years ago you'd identify a threat to create a signature that would get distributed to all your customers. Those signature-based threats don't last very long anymore. It may only be up for a day, or even an hour, and then there's a new threat out there. Speed of response to threats is absolutely critical.”

“What's the best practice here?

It still comes back to the right set of policies, education and tools to enforce those. But there's a world of difference between discussing it after the fact and catching it in the act. If you tell a manager there were certain violations in their department over the last month, it will generate some activity and might decrease 10% of the leaks. But if you're communicating to the employee that this action by you caused a security breach for the whole department, you'll get a completely different kind of response. There's a way to tie policy adherence to individual performance and learning. If a piece of data is being sent to somewhere it shouldn't go and it comes back to the individual, that keeps it from happening again.”

You can read more about the Websense Data Security Suite here. It accurately prevents data loss, secures business processes and manages compliance and risk by identifying confidential data, monitoring its use, discovering where it’s stored, and protecting it, on the network and at the endpoint.

Also, click here for details about the Websense ThreatSeeker Network, which allows us to provide customers with the most advanced content classification, data identification, and security filtering available to mitigate risks to customer data and productivity. The network uses more than 50 million real-time data collecting systems to parse one billion pieces of content daily in real-time.