The Fear biz is the computer security biz
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Lies, damn lies... Comment Scott Granneman looks at the use of fear in computer security, from misleading media reports and gross exaggeration by industry leaders to the use of fear in order to sell new computers and software.â¦
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Backdoor drafts, security moms and up-armoring
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Are you nervous about viruses, worms, spyware and other threats to your computer? Wish you had the power to appoint an intelligence czar to safeguard your PC?
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(Source: Computerworld) Peace of mind is in short supply these days among IT managers and network administrators, given the dangers out there today. Not only are internal threats ever-present, but highly paid cyber criminals half a world away are almost constantly trying to knock down security walls. The best defense, as it turns out, is a comprehensive risk management strategy.  Download this Technology Briefing to learn more.
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More than 80,000 Web sites worldwide display a small green logo that proclaims them to be "Hacker Safe." Is it a promise or a target?
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While security experts applaud Microsoft&#39;s recently released Service Pack 2, some companies that distribute their software over the Web are watching the product&#39;s introduction with dread and suspicion.
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Tech managers fear businesses are more vulnerable to malware because of wireless devices used by workers
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SecurityCoverage, an innovator in automated computer security services for home and small businesses, announced today that the company has achieved another record quarter in revenue for its SecureIT and SecureIT Plus 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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(InfoWorld) - Trying to lock down your company's applications and protect your systems from attack? If so, security scanners and source-code analysis tools are not up to the job -- despite vendor claims to the contrary. "There's an awful lot of marketing spiel, people introducing technology tools that are sold as silver bullets," said Mark Curphey, vice president of professional services at McAfee's Foundstone division, in an interview. "The reality is, in a large enterprise, those things generally don't work." "Technology is increasing at such a fast and crazy pace, but security technology isn't keeping up with it. With application security it's even worse," Curphey said. Security tools, such as code scanners, are able to detect just 1 percent to 2 percent of vulnerabilities in an application, leaving "gaping holes" behind, he said. Curphey, who has worked on security for U.S. financial institutions, is speaking this week at the Hack In The Box Security Conference (HITB) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Software vendors and companies must get back to basics to secure their applications. "What the smart banks are doing about this is they're building security into their development life cycles and that's exactly what Microsoft has done," he said. Since being hit by a series of high-profile vulnerabilities in its software, Microsoft hasÂ significantly improved the securityÂ of the software it produces, resulting in fewer critical vulnerabilities being reported. "Microsoft are going to be the security vendor of choice in the next couple of years," Curphey said. "There's been a phenomenal turnaround in that company." While a company's IT systems may never be perfectly secure, IT managers should be able to identify and mitigate risks. "At the end of the day, security is about building something that's secure enough to do business on," Curphey said. To help protect their systems, companies need to be sure they are hiring IT staff with the right set of technical skills, setting business processes that determine how to respond to attacks on the system, and providing staff with the tools they need to respond when attacks happen, he said. HITB runs through Thursday, Sept. 21.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Be careful out there people Symantec is backing a scheme run by the UK government and police to get small and medium sized businesses to take online security and safety more seriously.â¦
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Wireless security threats are overhyped and easily stopped. You have bigger things to worry about, says a Computerworld editor.
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At Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference, Yahoo CIO Lars Rabbe described the company's IT security approach, which involves embedding a small, select team of security staffers called the Paranoids within operating units.
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Security is becoming standard and there's the smell of blood in the air as the industry is increasingly dominated by big-name companies.
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It is not an area of business where you'd normally think of Novell providing the infrastructure. But business and retail transaction security is becoming a burgeoning business for the company that helped create the PC network.
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Thereâs a common nightmare haunting CISOs (computer information security officers) that features a glance at the morning paper, and 72-point banner headlines with the name of their employer and the words âLOSTâ and âCUSTOMER DATA.â
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As pests, adware, and other malicious applications infiltrate corporate computers with greater frequency, some vendors, including McAfee and Computer Associates, are bundling anti-spyware into security management suites, giving IT more tools to control the hazard.