These are dangerous times for electronic communications. Daily we read of successful cyber-attacks that have breached preventative measures such as firewalls and anti-virus software. For a financial services company, a breach compromising confidential client information is also a reputational breach compromising bonds of trust built over many years with clients.

A recent attack on the New York Times reveals the extent to which organizations are vulnerable. There is actually good news in this article. The term over which the New York Times was attacked was short: four months. Many attacked organizations will go years before learning their security has been compromised. Many will remain unaware.

Last year, the FBI's top cyber cop Shawn Henry spoke to this last point when he noted that they were finding other companies' stolen information in unrelated investigations. He stated, "They are shocked and, in many cases, they've been breached for many months, in some cases years, which means that an adversary had full visibility into everything occurring on that network."