With many organisations giving cloud computing serious consideration, a question we are often asked is, "Should we be putting our data in the cloud?" Organisations should be concerned about their data, wherever it is - it's a strategic business asset, after all. Indeed, this concern should extend to wherever the data is, depending on what it is and how it is being used. 

Each organisation is different and no blog post would be long enough to map out all the different risks and options, but we can get an idea of where to look for causes of concern. Here we separate risks out into non-scientific but nonetheless helpful categories of security, privacy, supplier and compliance. 

Security risks first, then. When we say data need to be kept secure, what we're really thinking is that malicious third parties can't get hold of it, to use or damage it in some way. Of course you need some kind of assurance that a cloud provider is protecting your...

Social Engineering Attacks Soar as Polymorphic Malware Rate Peaks at 72% of Email Malware in September; Cyber Criminals Ambush Popular Blogging Platform to Push Pills

Welcome to the September edition of the Symantec Intelligence report which, combining the best research and analysis from the Symantec.cloud MessageLabs Intelligence Report and the Symantec State of Spam & Phishing Report, provides the latest analysis of cyber security threats, trends and insights from the Symantec Intelligence team concerning malware, spam, and other potentially harmful business risks. The data used to compile the analysis for this combined report includes data from August and September 2011.

Report highlights

• Spam – 74.8 percent in September (a decrease of 1.1 percentage points since August 2011): page 11
• Phishing – One in 447.9 emails identified as phishing (a decrease of 0.26 percentage points since August 2011): page 14
• Malware...