USA Today had an interesting article in Friday’s edition Tech section on corporate networks and security vulnerabilities.

Well worth the read with real interest for anyone in charge of – or who owns – any type of corporate network.

To me, the most interesting part of the article is the following passage:

In the vast majority of those cases, investigators discovered thieves routinely took days after initially penetrating a network to locate and break into valuable databases. And most often, the intruders spent weeks to years extracting data before being discovered.

“It’s one of the more shocking statistics we’ve run across,” says Verizon principal researcher Wade Baker. “The length of time it takes an organization to discover that data is leaving is often five to six months” after the initial breach.

That pattern suggests “many organizations right now have breaches they don’t know about and won’t discover for some time to come,” says Baker.

Find the article at the USA Today web site here.