Focus turns to network security: while many consider the telecoms infrastructure a vulnerable target for terrorists, the more immediate threats are at

Following the 9/11 attacks in the US, many within the telecommunications industry felt that a thorough security audit of all public networks was desperately needed. Some industry executives assumed that the country's infrastructure--especially the telecommunications system--represented a key target whose vulnerabitities would likely be exploited sooner or later.

Although the anticipated ideologically motivated sabotage hasn't occurred, technological advancements have presented new security challenges to enterprise and public networks.

Public networks today are hardly secure avenues of communication. If orchestrated attacks by terrorist organizations have yet to take place, individual exploits by hackers and authors of malicious code have become much more commonplace.

Such individuals often succeed in swamping both public and private networks with denial-of-service assaults. More frequently, they spread viruses and worms that are destructive to individuals using the public networks, rather than impacting the networks directly.