Growing virus production taxes security firms
404861
The engines cannae take it, captain The volume - if not the variety - of malware samples has undergone almost exponential growth over the last three years.â¦
62609
With viruses, worms, spyware, spam and phishing, running a computer this year -- especially one with Windows -- has often been a colossal headache. -Rob Pegoraro
584753
Companies are accused of infecting PCs, and then selling spyware-blocking software.
734686
Technology experts are warning about new strains of the insidious RINBOT computer virus that could potentially hijack network systems of businesses worldwide.
252232
According to some industry analysts, as many as 90 percent of all enterprise businesses currently assign oversight of anti-virus technologies to their desktop management teams, rather than ceding the work to security specialists.The reasons behind this fact are simple, market watchers maintain, as the process of keeping AV agents up-to-date, distributing new virus signatures to end points, and monitoring PC configurations for anomalies are exactly the types of tasks that IT operations teams are expected to carry out.If you add in the fact that many companies are looking at their IT security and management functions from the perspective of handling regulatory compliance demands, experts say, it becomes clear how much commonality exists between the security and management camps.As such, it should come as no surprise that a growing number of organizations are beginning to view much of their traditional security work -- in specific chores that don't involve warding off attacks -- from a systems management standpoint.That's the reason why security market leader Symantec plunked down $830 million for management software vendor Altiris in Jan. 2007, and why so many IT management technology providers are dipping their toes in the security waters, said Neil MacDonald, analyst with researcher firm Gartner."In most cases clients are looking to reduce complexity and costs, and improve overall systems manageability; today it's very hard to configure and manage security products made by multiple vendors, so we're seeing this trend toward what you might call Darwinistic operationalization," MacDonald said.Based on the growing management headaches created by the presence of so many security tools in the modern enterprise, businesses are looking for ways to centralize oversight of the various technologies and hand off their control to operational specialists, the analyst said.That is why Symantec and McAfee are pushing expanded management capabilities, and why so many companies with management backgrounds -- such as BigFix, Kace, and LanDesk -- are now actively marketing their security skills, MacDonald said."This is a very important trend, because most security issues actually arise in systems management, and even if you love Symantec and are on a path to acquire their various products, there's a pretty good chance that you'd at least consider the security solutions being offered by these other providers coming from more of an operational side," the analyst said."These companies on the operational side will definitely come head-to-head with the security companies, and really, that's a good thing for everyone," MacDonald said. "Because the endgame is that users should end up with more integrated functionality at a lower price."Of course, major IT systems management platform providers including CA, EMC, IBM, and Microsoft are also competing in the security market, and are doing so with increasing success based on their management skills, the analyst said."If a security person can do a better job by using management applications, and vice versa, then why not; even though these companies look at things through a different lens, there's a great amount of value in eliminating duplication of tasks such as inventory management," MacDonald said. "All the management vendors have a great case to make; convergence may be too strong of a word, but there will certainly be increased integration across security and operations-type applications."Strategy leaders at Symantec agreed that the confluence of security and systems management is seemingly unavoidable, especially as each of the processes becomes so much a part of the other.The shift is the primary reason why the massive AV and systems defense company was compelled to make such a significant investment in management expertise through its buyout of Altiris, executives said."When we looked at this area and how we wanted to approach the market, we saw management as changing the entire game right now because of a number of factors," said Tim Brown, senior director of architecture and strategy for Symantec."The bar for management has risen in the last few years with issues such as virtualization placing a heavier demand for coordination between security and management," Brown said. "We really needed to become a leader in both disciplines and offer a consistent fashion through which customers can manage and remediate their systems in a tightly integrated way."Symantec has been helping companies manage compliance issues for a decade, Brown noted, but alerting customers to problems that auditors might find is no longer enough, he contends, because users are also asking the vendor to provide the mechanisms necessary to remediate any issues it finds.Emerging technologies such as network access control (NAC) that involve everything from testing systems configuration to updating AV tools won't be as broadly adopted by end-users if vendors such as Symantec can't offer the ability to cover both the security and management tasks they require, the executive said.Leaders of systems management companies such as LanDesk echo Symantec's observation that their products are increasingly becoming the tools through which customers handle a great deal of security work."Many of our customers are having a hard time differentiating between systems and security management as so much of what they do to secure the device is around traditional systems management work," said Steve Daly, who took over as general manager at LanDesk at the beginning of 2007."Customers are looking for tools that give them a view into inventory, the known state of their systems, to do the remediation and bring everything into compliance, which is really the traditional realm of systems management," Daly said. "They're talking about moving to service management, but the reality is that they're caught up being reactive in break-fix mode; they want to move into more of an over-arching process focus, and that's driving a philosophical change for IT and how we deliver our products."Those factors are the very reason that a systems management specialists such as LanDesk was pushed to launch its maiden host intrusion protection system (HIPs) earlier this year, Daly said."Our opportunity comes from being able to lock down the device and watch the device and defend it in a preemptive manner, versus after an attack hits the device," Daly said. "I think it will be more of a challenge for the Symantecs of the world to build a single client that covers both security and management, coming from their side of the business."Other management technology vendors said that they have long considered security as one of their core strengths, even if they didn't market their products as such.Marty Kacin, co-founder and chief technology officer at systems management appliance vendor Kace, said that midsize companies have been approaching the issue from a more unified standpoint for years, and that enterprises are merely beginning to follow suit in viewing the issues together.Along with covering issues of inventory and systems image provisioning, Kace's appliances provide features including security patch distribution and desktop vulnerability assessment."We've never differentiated security from management from the get-go, yet we never marketed around security until recently when it became clear that this was a message that resounds with customers," Kacin said. "And really when you think about it, it's not just that patching and configuration management relate to security, the issue is that the processes of systems management and security are fundamentally interdependent."Companies such as BigFix, which has marketed itself as a security and management vendor for some time, claim that their existing business models illustrate the very approach that enterprises must take when approaching the individual strategies."When your job is to sit on the end point and tell it how it needs to look and behave, it's clear that we're ideally suited to tackle both of these problems from a management perspective," said Greg Toto, vice president of products and operations at BigFix."CIOs are annoyed with the volume, complexity and integration issues driven by the use of all these security and management point products in unison," Toto said. "The value proposition of a company like ours is to provide control for a broad range of these agents via a single management console."
98304
Only in America CA has put its money where its mouth is by offering to cover US users of its new range of anti-virus products for as much as $1,500 worth of clean-up costs if they still get infected by malware.â¦
105425
Marks host malware Booby-trapped web pages are growing at an alarming rate with unsuspecting firms acting for nurseries for botnet farmers, according to a new study.â¦
383611
It&#39;s not just good cheer that spreads during the festive season. Also extending their tentacles are a plethora of computer viruses even as e-greeting cards sly about cyberspace.
595638
InfoWorld - 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.
641744
A small group of IT security startups are hoping to cash in on the rise of the botnet scourge as businesses -- telecommunications carriers and Internet service providers, in particular -- seek new methods for stopping the attacks.
693150
Software vendor mulls how to compensate Chinese comupter users effected by a buggy antivirus update last week.
211134
Companies expand security alliance to help businesses keep worms and viruses from getting onto networks.
443477
A small group of IT security startups are hoping to cash in on the rise of the botnet scourge as businesses -- telecommunications carriers and Internet service providers, in particular -- seek new methods for stopping the attacks.While larger security software makers, including Symantec, McAfee, and Trend Micro, have built botnet-fighting functions into their existing products, and carrier security specialists such as Arbor Networks have added tools for detecting the threats in their network monitoring systems, a handful of smaller companies are attempting to market themselves as purists in the anti-botnet field.As carriers, ISPs, and large enterprises investigate techniques to keep computers on their networks, and those of their customers, from being recruited into the zombie armies of botnet-controlled devices, some experts say that there may be a market for stand-alone technologies that address the problem -- at least for the next several years."If you look at the change in the characteristics of malware attacks over the last year, and the public outrage over data breaches, private and government organizations have reached a point where the botnet issue is directly accessible," said Nick Selby, analyst at The 451 Group."Botnets are very relevant to data loss, and without question, customers are looking for in-the-cloud protection and clean pipes; the problem is too complex for any individual user to deal with alone, even large enterprise users," he said. "Anti-botnet vendors could see compliance and media-fueled growth because everyone understands the issue of data loss."Just as Webroot was able to build and maintain a business dedicated to fighting spyware -- even in the face of competition from larger rivals who built tools for warding off those attacks into their integrated security suites -- vendors staking a claim to the anti-botnet space contend that there will be plenty of demand for their specialized skills.Perhaps the two best-known providers making noise in the segment are FireEye, a Silicon Valley startup backed by funding from Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners, and Damballa, an Atlanta-based company with roots at Georgia Tech backed by Sigma Partners and Noro-Moseley Partners.Leaders with both companies maintain that their businesses are already taking off as botnets take over."These networks of infected PCs have become, in essence, the world's largest computing grids. They dwarf the world's supercomputers in terms of their power, so that tells you something about the severity of the overall threat," said Ashar Aziz, chief executive of FireEye, who maintains there are currently as many as 150 million botnet-infected computers worldwide."This is the actual infrastructure that connects all the malware, spam, and denial-of-service attacks," he said. "A feature built into an end-point client is not going to solve the problem on its own; large enterprises and carriers are looking for something today that is going to help them keep their assets from being victimized."In addition to the carrier crowd, Aziz said that a growing number of large enterprises are seeking to take things into their own hands to ensure that their networks aren't being exploited by botnet commanders.Not only are large companies fearful of having their assets used as proxies by all sorts of attackers, and any potential fines that such activity or related data loss could lead to, he said, they are also hoping to avoid the embarrassment of having machines inside their walls publicly revealed as spam and malware delivery stations.Throughout 2007, researchers at network security technology vendor Support Intelligence repeatedly detailed spam runs emanating from well-known businesses, including Bank of America, Intel, and Nationwide Insurance, that were thought to be driven by botnet-infected computers.At the core of the company's anti-botnet technology, delivered via its appliances, is its FireEye Analysis and Control Technology (FACT) engine, which looks for suspicious traffic, confirms attacks, and blocks access from infected devices to other machines on a network.Using the information being drawn from its customers, which already include a number of large North American carriers and Fortune 1,000 companies, according to the CEO, FireEye claims that it also has the ability to backtrack its way through the networks of infected machines to scope out the size of botnet operations and work with carriers to snuff out the infrastructure.Aziz contends that even if anti-botnet technologies become digested in broader suites by most companies or through carrier-provided services, FireEye -- whose virtualization-based technology was originally positioned for use in network access control (NAC) systems when it was founded in 2004 -- will be able to turn a profit by providing the intelligence needed by those systems to identify and track the attacks."The capability to build this intelligence about the botnets themselves is a sizable business opportunity. These companies offering services will need to constantly feed new data into their gateways," he said. "We feel this is a viable business model, finding the infrastructure that is out there and helping people understand where it lives and how it works."Damballa, which takes it name from the realm of voodoo spirits, is already marketing its capabilities to both enterprises and carriers in a number of different models.For instance, the company already offers three deployment options to enterprise customers: its Global Surveillance Network, a subscription service that alerts users if any of their machines are infected by known botnets; its Enterprise Protection package, which uses sensors placed on clients' networks to look for attacks; and its Extended Enterprise Protection offering, which utilizes sensors outside companies' firewalls to look for attempts by botnets to connect to users' computers.It markets comparable services for carriers and other security OEMs.Damballa leaders said that the key to earning a spot inside more companies' operations will be the continued evolution and maturation of the threats themselves, and the company's unique ability to chart botnet behavior."We definitely see a best-of-breed opportunity for fighting botnets. It depends on the customer, but most of the success we're finding is with organizations who already have a lot of security technologies in place but still find themselves dealing with this problem," said Tripp Cox, vice president of engineering at Damballa, which was founded in late 2006."These companies are getting green lights from other products telling them that everything is OK, but they are still finding out about compromises inside their networks," he said. "A lot of the larger security players will have to have something in their suite to address the problem, and there's definitely potential for consolidation at some point in this space, but if you look at a problem like spam, there's a history there of companies building a stand-alone business to solve problems like this."The 451 Group's Selby said that there will likely be growth of the anti-botnet segment before any industry consolidation takes place, despite a wide number of companies --ranging from anti-virus vendors to massive carriers with managed security services -- who want to take on a broader piece of the market."It would seem to make sense for these [anti-botnet] companies to cut deals with ISPs to have better visibility into their networks and botnet activity in general, as they already have," the analyst said. "This is a market that should see expansion as botnets continue to become a bigger problem for everyone."
79039
Trojans, malware and phishing scams are all on the rise in the last six months, according to the company's Security Intelligence Report.
517001
Hi-tech viruses and malicious software programmes -- or malware -- commonly infect computers the world over: filling mail boxes with spam, deleting e-mail addresses, damaging machines and costing billions to corporations.
169890
Security firms are warning about smartphone viruses that can spread much faster than similar bugs.
297977
The venture capital industry is worried that a proposed increase in taxes on carried interest would hurt their ability to finance start-up companies.