Security has become a very big business in IT over the past few years. You'd think its growth as a commercial market would have made all our information more secure. It hasn't. Aside from the vendors that provide scanning, assessment and protection products, there are many specialized security consulting firms that will analyze your exposure and help secure your systems, as well as keep your company informed as new problems arise. With the growth of security as an industry, there have been many federal laws that aim to improve security standards and reporting requirements.

But does all this work better than it did a few years ago, when many researchers and hackers (people who need to figure out the inner workings of things, not bad guys) regularly looked for problems in commonly used applications and sites and reported on the problems they found, which often led quickly to fixes and resolutions?

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