Symantec tries to widen reach beyond security tools
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Symantec is making a play for a broader market with a new "information integrity" strategy, which users and analysts said meshes with their needs for corporate security. The question is whether the vendor can execute on its wider vision.
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In an effort to include storage within its empire of security products, Symantec Corp. announced Tuesday that it is going after the backup market with live state recovery
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Symantec will showcase child-protection software that monitors children's activities online.
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Deal will combine Symantec&#39;s security products with Veritas&#39; storage software, resulting in reach from PCs to data centers.
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As networks increase in size and complexity, security products are growing in sophistication and security threats are becoming more ingenious.
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Beginning next week, users who pay Symantec to manage their security infrastructures will be able to get extensive information on global cyberthreats and threats particular to their IT systems.
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Symantec's primary strategy in the enterprise may currently revolve around the notion of IT risk management, but the company's latest research finds that efforts to refine corporate process unrelated to security technology have become just as popular with customers moving to limit their exposure.
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The former plans to team up its intrusion prevention technology with the latter's vulnerability management software.
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Security company Symantec Corp. plans to announce the release of a patch management product on Monday that it says will enable small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to stay on top of software vulnerabilities.
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(InfoWorld) - Symantec has emerged from its bunker in the British countryside, moving its malware-fighting operations from a former U.K. military nuclear shelter to a more conventional office in Reading. The nuclear bunker, with concrete walls and an obscure entrance on a hillside near Twyford, England, was used for one of the company's Special Operations Center (SOC). The regional centers are used by security analysts who are part of the company's Managed Security Services. Companies hire Symantec to help with part or all of their IT security operations. The nuclear shelter may have been good public relations for a security company, but it wasn't comfortable: It lacked windows and had "sanitation" problems, company officials said. On Wednesday, Symantec offered a tour of its new facility in Reading to journalists, analysts, and customers. The facility, formerly used by storage company Veritas, which Symantec acquired in 2005, has twice as much space as the bunker and was needed to accommodate Symantec's growth. Symantec now has under one roof its consultancy, moved from Maidenhead, England, to the new facility, and its SOC, a move that will help dealing with customers, said Arthur Wong, senior vice president of Symantec Managed Security Services. Symantec only allowed visitors a brief peak at the SOC analysts working on Wednesday through a glass window with parted blinds. Those analysts sift through reports that note suspicious events on different companies' networks. Although much analysis of the log reports is automated, humans are still needed to look at data, said Alan Osborne, senior manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa operations. Symantec's service-level agreements mandate that they notify a client within 10 minutes of a critical problem, Osborne said. About 30 analysts work in the U.K. SOC. Symantec operates four other SOCs in the U.S., Australia, and Japan, which can be called on during emergencies. On Tuesday, a fire alarm went off, and the U.K. SOC's operations were rolled over to a U.S. SOC within minutes, Osborne said. Symantec officials said they are seeing rapid growth in managed security services due in part to companies trying to keep IT costs down while dealing with complex threats and government regulation. The oil company BPÂ started using Symantec's managed services about five years ago when it wanted to separate networks used to control oil production, such as those that turn on and off values, and its corporate network, said Robert W. Martin, DCT Digital Security. Access to one network from the other could be catastrophic, Martin said. BP usually gets between three to 10 security alerts a month from Symantec, which performs such functions as firewall monitoring, Martin said. For example, Symantec notified BP when it detected peer-to-peer traffic on their network, Martin said, which can be a sign of malicious activity. Other companies, such as Imperial Chemical Industries, are looking to managed services to outsource capabilities they don't have in-house. Paul Simmonds, the chemical company's chief information security officer, said they are considering Symantec services since they offer greater depth and research on threats. Now, hackers have typically focused on other industries, but "we know one day someone will work down the food chain and hit on ICI," Simmonds said.
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Symantec Corp. plans to integrate two of its compliance assessment products to make it easier for IT administrators to manage the software, a company executive said Thursday.
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As part of its service, Symantec will use a global network of probes and decoy e-mail accounts to collect, analyze and identify new phishing scams targeted at customers that use its Online Fraud Management services.
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During a weeklong period in mid-November, security experts with Symantec observed roughly 65,000 new applications being downloaded onto the computers of customers participating in a new research project -- based on their analysis of the software, as many as 60 percent of the programs were malicious.The involved timeframe represented a relative high point for the percentage of unknown applications being downloaded by Symantec's project participants, and the basis for the company's assessment of the programs as malicious was predicated largely on the programs' use of obfuscated naming conventions.However, the numbers point to a disturbing trend that the researchers say may force the security company to change its fundamental approach for warding off threats -- that being that the number of malicious applications coming to life on the Web appears to be outpacing the volume of legitimate programs.With malware authors using fuzzing tools to find holes in popular applications such as Web browsers, and testing their work against commercial anti-virus (AV) products to ensure that the attacks evade detection by the tools, leading researchers at Symantec admit that defending against threats using traditional methods has become something of a losing battle."The reality is that most new malware is going undetected by commercial security products, and not just Symantec's, but we have to recognize that like all other AV products we are probably missing a sizeable amount of this malware," said Carey Nachenberg, a member of the company's Security Response team who also wears the title of Symantec Fellow."Eventually we write [virus] signatures and get those out to customers, but it appears that a sizeable proportion of this malware never gets detected," he said. "Instead of distributing one copy of each malware program to thousands of people, they're producing a copy for as few as two or three people and then re-writing it; so, if we get one version we can remove it from a few computers, but not all the variants. The problem with this is that there is the potential over time for almost everyone to have some form of infestation, maybe in only a few years time."The trend toward malware authors using small runs of attacks to evade detection and hook as many victims as possible, known as server-side polymorphism, is forcing Symantec to reassess how it goes about protecting its users.Since it can't hope to keep up with every flavor of threat that is being created, traditional countermeasures such as the use of malware signatures or behavioral heuristics will need to be augmented with new tactics, Nachenberg said.One such alternative is the use of the same distributed data collection capabilities that Symantec is using to track the proliferation of malware. By creating a system of file and Web site reputation by studying applications usage patterns among its customers, the researcher said, Symantec hopes to use a community approach to help people determine which programs they decide to use, or avoid.Much as many people turn to the reviews section on Amazon.com or the buyer feedback system on eBay to get a real-world take on products before they decide to buy, Nachenberg contends that by watching how people are using various applications the security vendor can use a process of elimination for weeding out malware from legitimate software.If only a few people among the millions of Symantec customers who could contribute usage data to such a program were utilizing some application in question, it would be prudent to recommend that people avoid the program until its nature has been better determined, he said.Using opt-out tools that provide anonymous feedback on applications that were built into Symantec's existing Norton AntiVirus and Internet Security 2008 products, the company is already gathering the type of data necessary to create such a system of recommendation."Right now this is just a long-term research project, but we hope that as we get more users involved in the system, we can truly get a better idea of what is on people's computers so that we can identify malicious software based on the demographics of who is using it, versus what it does," Nachenberg said. "We're hoping to get more clarity through the large base of users we have; by collecting this data we should be able to get the most comprehensive view of the usage patterns to derive reputation information for everything they use."Faced with questions over potential privacy issues driven by Symantec's ability to watch just who is using what applications and how, the researcher reiterated that users must be made aware of the data collection, allowed to opt-out, and guaranteed that all the information aggregation is done in an anonymous fashion.By offering users the ability to decide whether or not to use an application based on demographics, versus simply blocking programs based on its own observations, the company will also give people more freedom to determine what tools they feel are appropriate to use, he said."If we know that only five people are using a program, given the tens of millions of users we ultimately hope to have in the system, we can be totally objective and recommend that people wait until it is scrutinized further before using it," the researcher said. "We will need to have some manual process for white-listing programs as well, but we think that using this approach we can deliver a reasonable amount of quality with a low false positive rate."If the volume of new malware strains arriving on the Web continues to outpace the proliferation of legitimate programs, Nachenberg said that AV vendors including Symantec may need to move to a white-listing approach in general, and focus more attention on identifying good applications instead of trying to chase down all the bad."If there is less software to analyze that is good, it makes more sense to spend our time scanning for good programs and simply telling our users to avoid everything else," he said. "We're considering models where we can produce the world's largest up-to-date white list of software, but it's not something we can put together in a year; maybe in two-to-three years time."
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A worm was released recently designed to break into corporate computers running Symantec Corp's security software and make them part of its botnet.
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Symantec's identity-protection software is designed to make Web surfing safer.
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Symantec kicked off the start of its Vision user conference unveiling a host of enhancements to Veritas NetBackup.
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Blog: Symantec technology creates new protection for Internet Explorer users.