Day and night, the war of attrition rages in the beleaguered world of network security. Defenders throw up firewalls, download patches, and scramble to fend off the hundreds of thousands of attempted intrusions into worldwide enterprise data.

The siege, a deep drain on corporate budgets, has been largely invisible to the general public and, until recently, even to the legions of employees who work outside information technology. But with the rising volume of spam, and the spread of inbox-clogging worms like MyDoom and Sobig, even noncombatants have begun to grasp some of the dimensions of the business security challenge.

"You go back 10 years and there might have been a hundred viruses a year," said Randy Breault, manager of information security services for Hannaford Brothers Co. in Portland, Maine. "Now there are several hundred a month."

By Robert Weisman at Boston.com

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