More than half of server administrators worldwide rate targeted malware attacks as their number one concern and they are becoming less confident in their ability to identify and halt attacks. And the number of organizations suffering targeted attacks increased by 8 percent over last year, according to a new report.

One-fourth of the respondents to a server security survey by Bit9 say they have been hit by advanced malware attacks—up 8 percent over last year--while 18 percent say they don't know, and 57 percent say they have not been attacked.

It's a good news, bad news thing. First the bad news: the number of attacks on server is rising and organizations are pessimistic about their ability to detect and stop these attacks. The good news is that they are becoming more aware of these attacks on their servers, and possibly getting better at detecting them, according to Bit9.

"There is greater awareness in the importance of securing servers," says Ilana Goddess, product manager for Bit9. "It's not good that the threat level is rising [for them], but at least organizations are concerned and aware and are making efforts to [defend] against that increasing threat."

Bit9's report is drawn from responses from 1,000 IT server administrators, most of whom run Windows servers (75 percent). One third say more than half of their servers are virtual.

While targeted attacks were the number one security concern for servers (52 percent), next on the list were compliance (19 percent), unauthorized change affecting availability or performance (18 percent), and the existing server security solution requires too much labor (12 percent).

Close to half of the server admins say their virtual servers are more secure than physical servers, and their lowest-risk servers. Two-thirds say their Web servers are at highest risk of advanced attack.

Operational issues such as VM management, access control, and auditing were the top security concerns for virtual servers (62 percent), and vulnerabilities, 26 percent.

The full Bit9 report is available for download here.

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