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The Application Whitelisting and Security Weblog

Application whitelisting and the importance of trusted change

Traditional endpoint security based on patching and after the fact antivirus blacklisting is drawing to a conclusion of its useful life. It’s a topic that has been in the news much of 2009 and has comprised the topic of many of my own posts. For a sampling of this topic check out any of the following posts:

That, however, is not the topic of today’s post. Today I want to talk about application whitelisting as a compliment to, or alternative for, antivirus and the importance of managing additions and updates to legitimate applications – with the least amount of operational friction. Continue reading this post…

The 451 Group Roundtable: The Real Benefits of Application Whitelisting

The 451 GroupPlease join Paul Roberts, senior analyst of enterprise security at The 451 Group, for a completely new look at Application Whitelisting in his webinar entitled “What Are The Real Benefits of Application Whitelisting: Security, Operations, Compliance?”

The webinar, sponsored by CoreTrace, will be held on October 27th at 2:00 p.m. EDT/11:00 a.m. PDT. Continue reading this post…

Memory Protection is an Important Component of Application Whitelisting Solutions

More companies than ever are looking at alternatives to blacklist antivirus. It isn’t hard to see why. Rampant botnets, endless patching, and signature distribution that simply can’t keep up with the threat are just a few of the reasons why IT and security professionals are looking for viable alternatives to protect their endpoints. Even Gartner group has said it is time to start over on desktop security. Continue reading this post…

Top Endpoint Security Stories – September 2009

Last month I kicked off a post focusing on the top endpoint security stories in the past month. This month brought a number of endpoint security events ranging from the latest Microsoft zero-day vulnerabilities without a fix to botnet and phishing news. The theme of the month is that both individuals and corporations are simply losing the battle against online criminals when it comes to desktop security.

  • Sept 1, 2009 – IIS FTP flaw announced with exploit code
    Microsoft kicked off the month by confirming the publication of exploit code for the IIS FTP vulnerability that could allow remote code execution on affected systems. The vulnerability affected systems running the IIS web server and was particular dangerous to FTP servers that had anonymous accounts for uploads. Continue reading this post…

Observations from IANS ‘09 Information Security Forum – Day 1

I’m here this week in Boston, MA attending the IANS 2009 New England Information Security Forum. It’s a great, interactive conference of security professionals sharing their experiences and observations of the current environment for enterprise security. Here are my thoughts from Wednesday’s sessions.

The IANS founders kicked things off with some into “keynote” observations.

  • Signs of economic recovery may bode well in the fight against crimeware. According to the founders (I am not sure I completely agree yet) economic indicators (using the Dow and NASDAQ) show that we are back to where we were this time last year. The founders made a point that a tough economy is correlated to an increase in crimeware. Continue reading this post…