Although image spam is not new, it continues to grow both in sophistication and at alarming rates, so much so that it has become a major topic of concern among security industry experts.

Its the economy, stupid. It worked for spammers now, and it will work for spammers in the future.

In April 2006, after a five-year review, the Supreme Court approved changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) that went into effect on Dec. 1, 2006.

When the subject of email security is mentioned, the first thought that comes to mind is spam or more appropriately anti-spam.

Webster defines security as, the quality or state of being free from risk of loss and that measures [are] taken to guard against espionage or sabotage, crime, attack or escape.

A new type of threat has emerged that poses a significant risk to businesses - this threat is real. There are examples of it in the news. There are security experts who are warning against the risk. So why are most companies ignoring it?

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)-encrypted communications constitute a significant and growing percentage of the traffic in the enterprise LAN and WAN. However, as many IT managers are aware, the privacy benefits provided by SSL can be overshadowed by the vulnerabilities encryption brings to the enterprise network.

As a fast growing company that has developed its business around proprietary technologies, WebEx faced the same dilemma. We needed to prevent intellectual property (IP) and other sensitive information from leaving the company via the corporate network but didn't want to change or disrupt our working environment. We initially tried to handle network security and stem information leakage by communicating security policies to employees, but this approach gave us no way to monitor network usage or to enforce our written policies.

IT security has the potential to impact a business at every level. Few other business areas, if any, have the potential to damage customer relations, disrupt supplier dealings, lower employee productivity, lose revenue and even lead to the arrest of the CEO.

The internet has come under a sustained and significant threat from network malware, especially since the emergence of the global Windows network worm in 2001 with Code Red and Nimda. Prior to this, most network worms were on a small, localized scale.