Peterson added that often times,  if there is a machine in the environment that has been infected you can see that with IPS. With the recent Conficker scare, Peterson noted that IPS - together with patching - was the number one defense mechanism.

IPS is a well known technology, but there is another piece of the puzzle that is needed too in my opinion at the network layer - and Peterson agrees. Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) sit in front of a web server to do live (virtual) patching and protect against application threats.

"If anyone out there is running a web server take some time and look at your web server logs you will see cross site scripting, password guessing and will see SQL injection attempts guaranteed," Peterson said. "Criminals want to put malware on your site so the next person that visits your website is exposed to malware. WAFs are a critical solution to make sure that all of the requests going to your web servers are inspected."

It all makes great sense to me and highlights the role that network security mechanisms have in securing enterprises and users. Sure, users need to have some common sense too, but a lot of what is bad out on the network can be blocked by the network.