For years, antivirus engines have been the primary defense against viruses, worms, Trojans, bots, and all other forms of malware designed to gain access to our emails, social networking sites, and corporate networks. While collecting their signatures from honeypots and gathering self-propagating threats has been useful in detecting malicious behavior in the past, things have changed. Today’s threats aren’t propagating. They’re using social engineering to lure their victims instead, thus breaking the traditional AV model. Continue reading this post…
Web-based malware breaking traditional AV model
A call for proactive security … I prefer real protection
With industrialized hacking on the rise, organizations serious about protecting their data must take proactive measures if they expect to win the war against cybercriminals. That’s Imperva CTO Amichai Shulman’s straight-forward message to applications owners everywhere and lists some real trends that are threatening businesses everywhere. My take, this is a good list, but while proactive is good, protective is better.
In this week’s TechJournal South article, “Industrialized hacking tops five data security trends for 2010″, Mr. Shulman’s data security firm listed its top five security predictions for 2010: Continue reading this post…
Social network security key issue for business in 2010
There have been many cases of social networks overlapping security software this year. Whether they are using Twitter or Facebook for botnet control or propagating phishing links through shortened URLs, online criminals are finding ways to tap into the explosive growth of social networks and use that to exploit end users and their devices.
A recent article in SearchSecurity.com, “Hackers to sharpen malware, malicious software in 2010″, points to increasing sophistication in cybercriminals’ use of social networking sites. 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…
Anti-virus’ days are numbered
Anti-virus simply isn’t effective anymore at providing desktop security. We have posted on this topic quite a bit recently, but it seems to have an endless supply of new information and postings that support the growing trend away from reactive, signature dependent anti-virus.
Consider the recent post from long-time industry expert, Robin Bloor, titled The Beginning of the End For AntiVirus. Robin has been a long time advocate of moving away from a clearly broken anti-virus technology and moving toward a more proactive solution that can solve the problem of zero day threats and root kits. He had this to say about the growth of whitelisting and the fall of AV in his article: Continue reading this post…