SonicWall to bolster next OS with anti-virus scanning capabilities
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Company says having the operating system screen for viruses at the gateway is more thorough and more efficient.
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New utility from PivX keeps intruders out of Windows systems.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft's Ben Fathi has a new job now that Vista has shipped, but the man who led the company's Security Technology Unit is still focused on keeping the bad guys away from your PC. Fathi is now corporate vice president of development with the Windows Core Operating System Division, and is in charge of building the guts of the OS -- things like the kernel, networking, and security. IDG News Service sat down with him recently to discuss the future of Windows security. With the first Vista bugs now being reported, Fathi says it looks like Vista is on track to meet his own stated goal of having half the flaws that plagued XP during its first year. Following is an edited transcript of the interview, conductedÂ last week at theÂ RSA ConferenceÂ in San Francisco. IDGNS: What's going to be the big security story in 2007? Fathi: What we've done in previous OS releases and Vista and what our security partners are doing has treated security as a defensive measure. It's a way of stopping people from attacking you. What we want to do now is move to a world where we actually enable and simplify collaboration between different individuals, by making sure that those connections are end-to-end, that you can provide very fine grained control over the people, the applications and the resources that you give access to. IDG: So what are you doing to make that happen? Fathi: There are a number of things we are working on. For example, isolation. We look at isolation in terms of network isolation, whether it's IPsec [Internet Protocol security] or putting in firewalls, or SSL VPN [Secure Sockets Layer Virtual Private Network]. What we want to do is provide a better layer of isolation at the operating system level. We're looking at putting hypervisors underneath the operating system and building attestation and building a hardware root of trust on the machine. What that means is that today, if a rootkit makes it onto your machine, it can do a hyperjacking. It can take over the OS or it can even get underneath the OS so that any software you're running, like Kernel Patch Protection, won't even know that it's being lied to by a piece of malware underneath. What we want to do is put the hypervisor there and use things like the TPM [Trusted Platform Module] chip to make sure that the entire boot path is protected and secure and we can trust it and it hasn't been tampered with. This also gives you the ability to create isolation by creating partitions on the machine. Let's say you're running a server. If you consolidate your server workloads onto a single big machine -- you have a Web workload and a file server workload and a database workload. You want to protect that database workload because you're running your line-of-business apps on it. Just because somebody broke into your Web server doesn't mean they should be getting access to your database or your file server. IDGNS: Are you surprised by the number of Vista bugs that you've had reported since the launch? Fathi: I made a statement six or nine months ago that I would like to see half as many vulnerabilities as XP in the first year. Obviously I'd like less than that. I'd be happy with zero. But I think it's reasonable to say, given the additional complexity and given the additional size of Vista, that half as many would be a great goal. Am I surprised with the number? No, I think it's been a relatively small number of vulnerabilities in the three months we've been out. And given the fact that we proactively went out to the Black Hat conference and handed out copies of this, and that a couple of million people have been using Vista in test versions for the past year or so, that tells me that there are already hackers out there that are trying to attack it. So given that there are less than a handful of vulnerabilities discovered, I think that's good progress. IDGNS: And you're on track for that half as many? Fathi: I think so. Ask me again in six months. Â
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Companies expand security alliance to help businesses keep worms and viruses from getting onto networks.
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Security pros have their say Anti-Virus vendorsâ¦
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The companies plan to share security features to help customers protect their networks from worms and viruses.
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D-Link on Monday announced that it is shipping Securespot, a new hardware device that provides threat protection for up to four computers and also offers parental controls for families. It costs $99.
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Antivirus software company McAfee Inc. said on Monday that a new version of its VirusScan Enterprise software contains so-called "intrusion prevention" features that can protect computers from attacks such as buffer overflows, which are often used by viruses, worms and malicious hackers to compromise vulnerable Microsoft Corp. Windows machines.
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(InfoWorld) - A security vendor is offering an add-on product for Windows Vista's User Account Control feature, which has been flagged as a threat to business users because it can be easily bypassed by hackers. BeyondTrust's Privilege Manager 3.0, which will be available on March 19 and costs $30 per user, protects enterprise desktops running Vista with User Account Control in two major ways, said John Moyer, CEO of BeyondTrust. First, it grants elevated privileges to certain applications and functions transparently to end users, instead of involving them in the process with dialogue boxes, he said. Hackers can use these dialogue boxes to trick users into unknowingly allowing malicious code to run on the machine. Security vendor Symantec recently released research thatÂ outlined some of Vista's security holes and listed User Account Control as one of them for the reason Moyer outlined. Microsoft has said it is evaluating Symantec's research about Vista and will take steps to fix any vulnerabilities in the OS. Microsoft included User Account Control in Vista to add security by limiting the access individual users have to applications or functions. While this is an enhancement for home users, it presents a security problem for business users because in order to access certain applications that are beyond the scope of their limited privileges, they must set up and use administrator passwords to set higher access rights, Moyer said. These dialogue boxes that ask them for passwords provide a way for hackers to get in, he said. The second feature of Privilege Manager that helps prevent intrusion through User Access Control gives IT administrators centralized administration of setting the elevation of privileges for users, even though Privilege Manager itself runs locally, Moyer said. BeyondTrust's application connects to the group policy features of Vista to allow for this type of administration, he said. BeyondTrust spun off from Desktop Standards, a company which Microsoft announced it had purchased on Oct. 2. Twenty employees of DesktopStandard took the Policy Maker Application Security product and became BeyondTrust. That product later was rebranded Privilege Manager, Moyer said.
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Windows XP Service Pack 2 promises to raise the security bar for the sometimes beleaguered operating system. Unfortunately, one of the new features could be spoofed so that it reports misleading information
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Worried about catching viruses, spyware, or other malicious software while surfing the Web?
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Blog: New behavior-monitoring protection for the desktop is designed to compliment features in existing Symantec products.
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New software upgrades to Version 4.5 of DeviceWall allows network administrators to track what users do with specific files, and grant temporary access to storage devices such as USB flash drives.
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InfoWorld - Symantec will kick off its annual Symantec Vision conference next week with the first public release of its next-generation corporate anti-virus software, Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0.
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Killing a virus attack before it becomes damaging is something of a holy grail in today&#39;s security environment. That&#39;s because most viruses today are distributed through attachments to e-mail
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SUNNYVALE, Calif., Dec. 7  /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SonicWALL, Inc.
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Windows users will have another tool for protecting their PCs.