Verizon Business goes phishing with new service
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Verizon this week is launching Managed Web Content Services, which is designed to guard corporate info from phishing, spyware, malware and viruses.
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Several major industry players and law enforcement agencies are collaborating in a new effort to respond to the rapidly growing phishing problem.
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It wasn't long after caller ID became popular that some people signed up for telephone services to block their number from being displayed. Now comes another trick: Companies are marketing systems to help callers fool telephone identification services into thinking they are someone else entirely. -The Washington Post
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A recent flood of fake Citibank e-mail messages demonstrates the growing arsenal of tricks used by online "phishers."
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By Michael S Rosenwald, Washington Post Staff Writer  Verizon Communications Inc.
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Makes like VeriSign Verizon is shamelessly hijacking web browsers on its new fiber-optic internet service.â¦
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In a new competitive threat to Cablevision&#39;s cable-television and Internet services, Verizon Communications yesterday announced it will string fiber-optic connections directly to homes and
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(InfoWorld) - Enterprise companies will soon begin offloading many of their network security responsibilities to telecommunications and Internet service providers and save vast amounts of time and money doing so, if AT&T has its way. Speaking to the assembled crowd at the IDC Security Forum in New York on Wednesday, Edward Amoroso, chief security officer for AT&T's services division, predicted that enterprises will begin adopting more "virtual" security capabilities from their ISPs and bandwidth providers in the coming years as those companies are better positioned to do battle with botnets, spam, and denial-of-service )DoS) threats. Based on the bandwidth-providers' existing abilities to see spikes in traffic that are tell-tale signs of botnet, spam, or other malware activity -- long before enterprises can see evidence of the attacks on their own -- Amoroso contends that companies will soon concede the process of fighting the threats and turn to companies such as AT&T for help. "We think that security at the perimeter should be virtual, which is a somewhat controversial concept, because a lot of time, effort, and career capital has already been spent securing the perimeter," Amoroso said. "But we think a lot of existing technologies there are running out of legs, and simply running firewalls at the gateway is no longer a valuable proposition." The United States government's Telecommunications act of 1996 prevents carriers from approaching customers and marketing services to them based on any trends they observe on the end users' network connections. However, the companies can already identify much of the spam and malware activity being carried out in the pipe, based on their massive infrastructure, and should be enlisted to help solve security issues, he said. For threats such as distributed DoS that can easily be thwarted upstream, the CIO said, it makes little sense for companies to continue to invest in new technologies and staff when the carriers could easily detect and snuff out the campaigns ahead of time. "How do you stop DDoS at the edge? The physics just don't make sense. When these attacks happen, the customers' routers will already be dead," said Amoroso. "We think the idea that the pipe should be dumb is strange; with spam accounting for 90 percent of all traffic on the e-mail pipe, we're delivering nothing but more attacks, malware, and junk. If people want us to keep doing that we can, but why would they want us to keep doing that when we can see it, scoop it, study it, and stop it?" Lest someone should contend that AT&T and other carriers are merely licking their chops at the prospect of adding pricey new security services to their products, the expert said security services should eventually become a set of non-optional capabilities included with the purchase of ISP and telephony services. Much as the carrier community focused on providing faster services in the 1980s and added tools to improve quality to their products in the 1990s, the CIO said that security services will become a de facto element of all the capabilities that the firms market. While early adopters are already paying a premium to use the security capabilities offered by carriers today, eventually the price should be blended into the packages of capabilities that companies buy from providers such as AT&T, the expert predicted. At the same time, AT&T and other carriers would have to sacrifice their existing businesses of selling firewall management and intrusion detection-type systems into enterprises, he said. But the move to push security tools to the bandwidth providers is one that has been made even more likely by the complexity of those technologies. "I think we'll come out of this decade thinking it was silly to have separate perimeter security systems, it doesn't make sense to build the network and overlay security as an afterthought," Amoroso said. "We have as large of a managed security services business as anyone, but this work is better off embedded in the pipeline." Emerging mobile and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services will also include integrated security capabilities that replace many of the systems being implemented to protect those technologies today, according to the AT&T CIO. "We can virtualize these things, and any carrier can do it; this is the direction that perimeter security is headed in. It's not a collision course, but rather something very pleasant, as finally there's something smooth and simple to solve these problems," he said. "It's absurd that all we hear today is that the carrier plays no role in all of this, that companies should do it at the edge. We know it's a lot of work, but we're already prepared to do it."
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(InfoWorld) - Enterprises using the network-based firewall offered by Verizon Business will now be able to control it much as they would a firewall on their own networks. The global business services unit of Verizon Communications will let customers go outside the standard templates it has offered so far and tune firewall features to meet their specific needs. The company was set to announce the change on Monday at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. As business operations spread around the world through outsourcing and mobile work, the line between the inside and outside of a corporate network becomes more complicated. For U.S.-based organizations, Verizon Business sells the Secure Gateway Network-based Firewall as an alternative to IT departments installing and maintaining their own firewalls. The service runs on modules in Cisco routers in Verizon's network core. Since it rolled out the service about 18 months ago, the carrier has given customers a choice of templates for what they want the firewall to do. For example, one template might allow only e-mail packets to come in from the Internet. But the templates don't fit every enterprise need, said Eric Sorensen, senior group manager of secure gateway services at Verizon Business. For example, an automaker that gets parts from a third party may want to let nonemployees onto its servers, but only those logging in from a certain factory and using a particular application, Sorensen said. With the Secure Gateway Network-based Firewall (custom), an IT administrator can set that kind of rule, he said. The service includes a Web-based interface for making changes in real time. The standard edition with templates is still available. Most enterprises have balked at network-based firewalls because they don't want to give up granular control over their security, said Gartner Inc. analyst Alex Winogradoff. Verizon's new hands-on feature could help break down that resistance, he said. Handing off security to service providers follows the trend of enterprises letting carriers provide and manage their networks, Winogradoff said. Keeping firewalls in many locations up to date is not easy, he said. "It's a chore that is not part of the core business that enterprises want to be in," Winogradoff said. One thing that might worry enterprises about the network-based firewall is control over periodic updates to the underlying software. An IT manager worried about a new version of software would want to be able to keep using the older version until the problem was solved, Winogradoff said. The Secure Gateway Firewall is sold as a feature on top of a Secure Gateway port. A 1.5MbpsÂ port costs an average of $200 to start and $1,000 per month. The custom firewall option would cost $140 per month. Verizon Business hopes to offer the service to customers based outside the U.S. later this year. Also at RSA, Verizon Business will announce it is extending its denial-of-service protection system to Europe. Verizon DoS Defense Mitigation, which identifies and blocks attacks that use massive amounts of incoming traffic, is now available in 11 European countries, including France, Germany, Spain and the U.K., the company said. It plans rollouts in Canada, Latin America and Asia later this year.
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A new service promises cheaper mobile calls by exploiting VOIP, but it's not going to be easy. The big carriers must be considered, plus customers will have to punch lots of extra numbers. By Rachel Metz.
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US consumers and businesses have lost an estimated 500 million dollars to a relatively new Internet scam known as &quot;phishing,&quot; according to a survey released this week.
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A pair of phishing vulnerabilities this week targeted at Google Inc. point to the kind of new threat Web companies can face as they expand their services into desktop applications, security experts say.
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For many online users, the idea that their Internet provider was particularly aggressive in cracking down on e-mail spam would be welcome news. But some of Verizon's 3 million high-speed Internet customers say the company is bungling the job and hurting their livelihoods.
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By Annys Shin  The Better Business Bureau network was the target of a "spoofing" scam last week in which thousands of businesses in the United States and Canada received e-mails encouraging them to download what is thought to be a computer virus.
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(InfoWorld) - Banks and other companies switching their phone systems to VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) are making themselves vulnerable to phishing attacks for which there are currently no effective detection or prevention tools, a security researcher warned Wednesday. "People will be able to penetrate bank networks and hijack their phone lines," said an independent security researcher, known by his pseudonym The Grugq, in an interview. VOIP is becoming increasingly common as companies and operators look to the technology to help cut costs, which makes them moreÂ vulnerable to attack, he said. The Groqg, who spoke this week at the Hack In The Box Security Conference (HITB) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, saidÂ VOIP phishing attacksÂ will emerge by the end of this year. The attacks will allow hackers to steal personal data, including credit card numbers and bank account information, and there is little security managers can do to stop them. "Theoretically, you phone up your bank and the customer service line has been taken over by hackers," The Grugq said. In this scenario, the customer would be asked by the hacker to enter personal banking information before being passed on to an actual bank customer-service representative. "There's no security technology out there that companies can deploy to fix this," The Grugq said, noting that existing intrusion-detection systems are not capable of detecting when a VOIP attack takes place. During his presentation at HITB, The Groqg announced the release of alpha code for SIPhallis, a tool he wrote that allows security managers to manage SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) VOIP packets on their networks. "It gives you an interface to create and send VOIP packets; it also allows monitoring of VOIP packets," he said, adding the application can also be used to inject packets into a VOIP stream. Existing softphone or PBX software is all that is required for hackers to launch a VOIP attack, The Grugq said. HITB runs through Thursday, Sept. 21.
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Security company says it has seen an attack using a cross-site scripting flaw in 2Wire DNS routers.
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Company is latest phone giant to file suit to stop data brokers from fraudulently obtaining customer information.