Security outsourcing on the rise
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As one of the world's largest outsourcing providers, Wipro Technologies is ramping up its security services business in a big way.
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Infosys Technologies profits from global outsourcing trends.
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As malware threats and regulatory compliance demands continue to grow more complex, IT will become increasingly dependent on SaaS (software as a service) offerings that let them respond to problems faster while also saving money, according to top executives at the world's largest anti-malware vendors.
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Enterprise security decision makers have long been more likely to be swayed by flashy new technologies than by the notion of comprehensive IT restructuring to protect data and other corporate assets, but the situation is evolving rapidly, according to experts participating in Forrester Research's ongoing Security Forum.
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Company has started sharing some APIs with security vendors, in a bid to create better ways of securing virtual machines.
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Check Point Software has beefed up its enterprise security gateways.
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Scammers and hackers are targeting the human factor in system setups. Part of a series on hot security topics.
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Contract manufacturing -- that is, owning the brand but outsourcing the manufacturing -- started as a trickle in the 1980s and is now reaching flood proportions. But hold on to your life raft, because the tide is about to get even higher.
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A sophisticated hacking scheme seen early last year appears to be affecting an increasing number of Web servers.
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In a new wave of the global outsourcing of services, personal chores are moving offshore, and this is leading to some daunting challenges, both economic and cultural.
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IT services giants will come under pressure from outsourcing alliances, as companies team up to beat the big guns.
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As more firms install software to keep tabs on workers, start-ups and heavy hitters alike spy an opportunity in surveillance products.
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The practice of cyber-espionage is rapidly moving beyond the government sector and finding its way into the world of international business, according to experts with SANS Institute, one of the world's top IT security training organizations.While the United States and Chinese governments, most notably, have accused each other in recent years of carrying out surreptitious hacking campaigns aimed at stealing strategic information from their respective IT systems -- and many security experts believe that both countries, and many others, are actively engaging in such electronic warfare -- leaders with SANS maintain that the practice has recently begun to spill over into the private sector with greater frequency.According to the training institute's latest research, cyber-espionage efforts funded by "well-resourced organizations" -- including both government-backed and private efforts -- will expand significantly during 2008, in particular as overseas companies look to gain an upper hand in negotiating business deals with large companies based in the U.S. and Europe.In one common scenario, said Alan Paller, director of research for SANS, organizations in the process of establishing legitimate partnerships with such companies are willing to pay hackers to break into those firms' IT systems to gather competitive information to gain an advantage at the bargaining table.More companies than ever before are finding out that they have been victimized in such a manner based on the discovery of their sensitive data in the hands of hackers and other fraudsters who have been apprehended by law enforcement officials, the expert contends."Cyber-espionage is clearly growing across the board. It was much bigger in 2007 than in previous years, and it is expanding slowly into economic espionage involving both businesses and government entities," Paller said. "This really has a lot of significant implications because people who have never thought of themselves as targets for this type of attack have suddenly become a sweet spot, and many are not prepared to defend themselves."Paller said that federal law enforcement agencies have been contacting private industry firms directly to inform them that their data may have been compromised. From closely-protected product designs to company financials, the expert said that cyber-espionage is already working its way into many different areas of business."If you live in a foreign country and you want to do business with a big American company, you want to negotiate the best possible deal, and we're seeing more evidence of instances where parties have clearly been paid to break into a companies' computers, as well as those of their accountants, consultants and lawyers, to find information that can be used to tilt deals in their favor," Paller said. "In some cases, it's fair to say that the people who are negotiating these deals overseas end up with more information than the people that are being paid to negotiate with them."Paller said that while in many cases the business data being stolen is being used to the advantage of private industry players, the training organization believes that a fair amount of the corporate espionage activity may be backed by government sponsors.While such attacks have been somewhat common among government and defense contractors for years, he said, the process is highlighting a lack of perception regarding security risks inside other major U.S. businesses.SANS reported that the attack of choice in many cases of cyber-espionage is a targeted spear phishing campaign that attempts to dupe workers into opening tainted attachments made to appear as if they come from people they work with.The content of the virus-laden attachments is often tailored to look exactly like legitimate materials that the employees involved might send to each other, making it more likely that users will open the messages and remain unaware that they may have been compromised, Paller said.Attackers crafting the messages most often use newly discovered Microsoft Office vulnerabilities, also known as zero day flaws, to further hide their activities and to circumvent anti-virus systems, according to the expert."This type of business-driven cyber-espionage is already happening a lot more frequently than some people might think," said Paller. "We're only finding real evidence because more companies are hearing from law enforcement when someone finally discovers the stolen data."On the flip side, SANS is also predicting that so-called insider data theft carried out against U.S. businesses by trusted employees will also continue to flourish.One of the factors accelerating that trend is the ability for attackers to attempt to attack their employers both from inside their networks and from the outside using known vulnerabilities they discover in their work, the group said.With traditional security perimeters increasingly being taxed by the use of mobile devices that are allowed to come onto corporate networks from outside the workplace, SANS said that workers are finding many new opportunities to sneak information out the door and sell for a profit.One of the key strategies that organizations need to embrace to thwart the insider problem is to put into place more substantial defenses that limit access to various IT systems and data stores based on the specific level of admission to those assets that individuals need to do their jobs, the training group said.
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The rise of customized malware is forcing security software vendors to change their tactics quickly and begin using customers' machines as their initial line of threat detection intelligence, according to a new report from Yankee Group.Echoing recent comments made by industry leaders like Symantec -- which is considering white-listing techniques, among many other emerging plans, to thwart the trend toward so-called server-side polymorphism -- Yankee Group Analyst Andrew Jaquith writes in a new research note that "herd intelligence" will be one of the most effective ways for vendors to detect and address increasingly customized threats.By turning their customers' endpoint devices into malware collectors that can funnel information about new attacks back into their global networks of threat sensors and scanning technologies, Jaquith said, security applications vendors may make faster progress in stemming the tide of lower profile, smaller volume threats.As malware authors have begun enlisting more malware toolkits and other technological means to create a greater number of attack variants than can be found and processed by honeypots and signature-based security software tools, the analyst said, it will become vital for vendors to aggregate threat data using customers' computers.Some smaller vendors, including ESET, Panda Security, Prevx, and Sana Security, have already begun working in such a fashion, turning their deployed endpoints into collectors.Larger vendors looking to add that type of technology to their pallets could seek to acquire one of those vendors, Sana in particular, to advance their plans more rapidly, Jaquith contends.The idea is simple, according to the analyst. If attackers are going to attempt to create different attacks for nearly every individual user, then security software vendors must use their customers' machines as their eyes and ears for discovering and addressing those variants.On the flip side, as the vendors amass information about new attacks, they can simultaneously help other customers determine whether new applications or Web sites are dangerous or safe to use, the analyst said."When an unknown binary attempts to execute, the client-side agent sends detailed telemetry information to a remote centralized server and asks whether it is good, bad, or unknown," said Jaquith. "The server makes a disposition decision based on all the collective history accumulated by the herd. By pooling information about all executing programs across its installed base, the herd makes smarter decisions and can confer immunity faster to new variants."As part of the effort, security vendors may also need to begin sharing more of that information with their rivals to create a larger network effect for thwarting malware on a global basis, according to the expert.It may be hard to convince rival vendors to work together because of the perception that it could lessen differentiation between their respective products and services, but if the process clearly aids on the process of quelling the rising tide of new malware strains, the software makers may have little choice other than to partner, he said."By turning every endpoint into a malware collector, the herd network effectively turns into a giant honeypot that can see more than existing monitoring networks," said Jaquith. "Scale enables the herd to counter malware authors' strategy of spraying huge volumes of unique malware samples with, in essence, an Internet-sized sensor network."Herd intelligence is not without its downsides However, despite the advantages of moving to a herd mentality model, the expert recognizes that there might be significant obstacles for vendors to overcome in making such a transition -- including the cost of shifting away form their existing malware signature creation and distribution methodology.Among the biggest issues for anti-malware vendors to consider is the issue of false positives as many legitimate or nefarious programs may be misclassified by one vendor or the other, and behavior detection-based tools will still be needed to keep an eye out for sites and applications that have been compromised.Customers may represent another hurdle, Jaquith said, as not all companies will initially be comfortable with sharing the necessary level of access with vendors, and some may fear that such a system could offer new opportunities for data loss. Prevx, for one, is already dealing with the issue of privacy by guaranteeing that the only information being sent over its pipelines from customer PCs is related to executable files.An even larger problem could be the "data glut" generated by the herd anti-malware networks."Telemetric data provided by herd endpoints will be substantial," said Jaquith. "Anti-malware vendors will need to spend significant millions of dollars of capital to create scalable infrastructures to collect, process, and store data furnished by endpoints."The white lists of legitimate applications maintained by anti-virus vendors will also need to be updated frequently to address the release of approved programs and patches, a process that will require even additional levels of cooperation between many different types of software makers, he said.Along similar lines, Symantec researchers recently detailed a new program through which they are gathering detailed information about software applications installed onto the computers of customers using its desktop anti-malware suite.Using an opt-out participation model, the experiment studies the behavior and distribution details of individual programs to help make recommendations to users about which programs they decide to install or avoid."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," said Carey Nachenberg, a senior member of Symantec's Security Research team."We're hoping to get more clarity through the large base of users we have," he said. "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."
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The importance these days of protecting your business from security threats is clear. But how to do it well often remains a vexing problem. Major IT vendors have faced this challenge like everyone else -- but with a twist. As providers of security technology and IT systems vulnerable to threats, they've had to stay a step ahead of everyone else. That's why CIOs of technology stalwarts IBM and Intel and security technology provider Symantec have taken on security management as one of their key functions. All three companies have shared their lessons learned with InfoWorld.
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Company is readying security software or cell phones and handheld devices.
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But mergers and outsourcing will keep tech job security in flux, according to report.