Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) infiltrates in our lives more and more, their usage is extensive both at home and in the economy. We take their presence as evident, as common infrastructural services. That is why their temporary failure or complete breakdown affects the corporate sphere, governmental organizations or households as severely as the deficiency of any other public utility. Moreover, all these technologies keep and supervise almost the complete circle of information resources, including either government and corporate data or the family photo album. It isobvious , that the flawless and secure operation of ICT can be considered as commongoal .

The problems and failures of this area are however typically approached from a technological point of view, albeit a system damage, failure or malicious attack has strong collateral effects on the economy and society, that are often neglected.

There is no uniform methodology to measure and describe these effects, neveertheless their quantification would be very important. Why? On the one hand, it is usual that not the IT-professionals decide about key figures of IT-spending, neither in the government, nor in the corporate sphere. Consequently, it is extremely important to make these problems tangible for them as well. On the other hand, the common social trust towards ICT may intensely be deteriorated if these problems are not handled properly and this threatens the modernization strategies aiming at to enhance digital literacy.

The Foundation for Information Society together with the National Cybersecurity Center (CERT-Hungary) and Bellresearch working as a research institute and independent professionals set themselves the aim to solve this anomaly. The goal of the collective research is to work out a standard methodology that makes this field measurable and comprehensible for economic-financial decision-makers and hereby IT-vulnerabilities can become better toned and get a more deliberate and uniform strategic approach in the future.

In the course of the analysis of the IT- and network-vulnerabilities the most menacing, critical problems have been taken into consideration. Basically two methodologies have been adopted during the analysis:

1. Categorization of IT-vulnerabilities according to vendor, software, version, etc. and the comparison of these findings with the Hungarian software- and ICT-usage statistics in the government, corporate and household sectors. The source of the software and hardware usage statistics is the research study „Hungarian ICT Report 2009” made by Bellresearch.

2. The detailed analysis of individual vulnerabilities and the possible effects of a cyber-attack taking advantage of this weakness. These instanceshopefully draw the attention of IT-executives and decision makers to this problem.

The study and presentation describes the first steps of this novel research in detail.