According to a new paper conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by CA Inc., the E-Government proposals intended to improve and modernize federal information systems and infrastructures are tragically fraught with a myriad of security risks.

The CA-sponsored study entitled "Cyber Security Mega Trends: Study of IT Leaders in the U.S. Federal Government" had over two hundred seventeen IT executive seniors as participants. They worked for a variety of American federal departments and were responsible for identifying noteworthy areas of risk when it came to integrating new technologies such as Web 2.0 tools (e.g., social networking applications, collaboration tools, wikis, and blogs), mobile devices, virtualization, and cloud computing into the government's digital databases.

The study further claims that the most dangerous cyber security threats to the nation's critical infrastructure, propriety government systems, and confidential data are as follows:

• Fifty-two percent of the participants claimed that Web 2.0 software such as wikis, blogging, social messaging, and social networking have contributed greatly to the continuous leakage of sensitive or confidential data as well as the vulnerability of networks to the ever-growing problems of botnet assaults and malware plagues.

• Sixty-three percent of the respondents view the mobilization of the government workforce as a significant factor to the rise of endpoint security hazards.  As a result, the overabundance of unsafe portable, data-holding gadgets that are vulnerable to botnet attacks and malware infections are compromising the overall safety of the national information grid.

• Seventy-one percent of those involved in the survey deem cyber terrorism as a quickly rising trend that poses a very real and grave threat to the safety and protection of commercial and governmental networks as well as the entire American digital infrastructure.

• Seventy-nine percent of those who participated in the study viewed the rise in the use of collaboration tools as a disadvantageous issue because they, the tools, could detrimentally increase the number of unstructured data sources that have sensitive or confidential data that isn't adequately secured or protected.

According to the government's IT senior executives, the other trends that could aggravate the possibility of security risks in the U.S. network grid include the use of open source programs (eighteen percent), outsourcing to third parties (thirty-four percent), rise in the use of cloud computing applications and resources (thirty-nine percent), virtualization technologies (forty-four percent), and a continued rash of data breach incidents (forty percent).