That cyber-threat landscape: where does it end?

Kaspersky Lab this week launched a product that the company believes will plug the gaps that occur when organisations take a fractured approach to IT security.

While offering a plethora of modules, the company hoped the suite would form a unified platform for threat management touching on areas such as mobile device security, network activity analysis, anti-malware protection and email security.

Another module within the product is one that actively scans all running applications governed by the network to see if they are up to date. Policy management tools can even prevent an application from running if it is insufficiently patched.

"The number-one target for a PC attack is not Windows itself; it's the unpatched software that it runs," said Vasily Dyagilev, managing director, Emerging Markets, Kaspersky Lab.

While the product range as a whole may go some way towards the single point of protection that has eluded CIOs, the very diversity of the modules reopened the common topic of IT security's changing shape and the scale of the problem faced by security companies as they jostle for market share in an increasingly malware-conscious market.

"From the business point of view the Middle East has become a very interesting region within the last few years," said Tarek Kuzbari, managing director, Kaspersky Middle East.  

"We've discovered Gauss, Flame and recently Red October.  This has definitely shifted the mentality of CIOs [towards] security in terms of how much of their budgets they are allocating."