Though the term is new, "blended" security threats aren't. These types of threats target several areas of network vulnerability simultaneously. What is new and unique, however, is what the malicious code within them is doing.

In a blended threat, malicious code can take many forms and can attack your enterprise in a number of different ways. It can also do more than one kind of damage while it's in your system.

You might, for example, find a piece of malicious code that can attack your company's computers through e-mail attachments, infected Web sites, or even through direct attacks on your routers and servers. Once inside your firewall, these threats can spread through everything from shared disks to internal Web servers. And they can spread to the rest of the world through e-mail and file transfers, for example.

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