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Back when Kevin Mitnick was incarcerated, the term “hacking” was loosely used to describe his string of illegal activities. However, if you take into account that most of his “hacking” was done without even touching a computer, you’ll discover that the right word to use would actually be one called “social engineering”.

And if you thought his incarceration would educate companies that handle sensitive information about the dangers of social engineering, then you’re dead wrong, because according to Symantec’s 2010 State of Enterprise Security briefing, social engineering is one of the fastest growing types of attacks that’s being faced by Malaysian companies.

What’s even more shocking though is that 31% of the respondents from 2100 worldwide enterprises of various industries claim that these attacks were highly effective. That’s right folks – your personal information such as credit card details, banking details and health details could have been given out to people with malicious intent through a single phone call.

In Malaysia alone, up to 50% of enterprises have reported that they are experiencing cyber attacks on a daily basis and out of these respondents, 100% have experienced cyber losses in one form or another.

In response to this, Symantec strongly urges organizations to keep their endpoints, messaging and web environments secure. IT admins need to work at keeping data security their top priority, since data is usually the key asset that these “hackers” are after anyway. It may be hard, since network security, endpoint security and messaging security are noted to be the top 3 under staffed areas of IT departments across the Malaysian industries, but with a strict enforcement of IT policies, regular patch updating, and of course the help of Symantec’s security solutions, things ought to be a little easier to control.

To review the full Symantec 2010 State of Enterprise report, hit up the official website here (http://www.symantec.com/about/news/resources/press_kits/detail.jsp?pkid=sesreport2010&inid=us_ghp_staticpromo_2010_state_of_enterprise).