As stated earlier, the Internet suffers from severe security-related problems. Sites that ignore these problems face some significant risk that they will be attacked by intruders and that they may provide intruders with a staging ground for attacks on other networks. Even sites that do observe good security practices face problems with new vulnerabilities in networking software and the persistence of some intruders.
Some of the problems with Internet security are a result of inherent vulnerabilities in the services (and the protocols that the services implement), while others are a result of host configuration and access controls that are poorly implemented or overly complex to administer. Additionally, the role and importance of system management is often short-changed in job descriptions, resulting in many administrators being, at best, part-time and poorly prepared. This is further aggravated by the tremendous growth of the Internet and how the Internet is used; businesses and agencies now depend on the Internet (often more than they realize) for communications and research and thus have much more to lose if their sites are attacked. The following sections describe problems on the Internet and factors that contribute to these problems.