Category: Trends

The survey also found that remote and home working has increased almost across the board, with 85% of organisations saying in had increased and 15% saying it had stayed the same. 92% of those quested stated that if affordable, and data security was assured, they would extend mobile working to more employees. … Just over a third of organisations (38%) allow people to work from home using their own equipment via a secure connection, and 85% provide a council issued laptop for accessing the network.

Now nine out of ten councils are using VPN, port control and strong passwords, and just over eight out of ten are using encryption and other technologies such as thin client solutions like Citrix and terminal services.

The Insider Threat was by far the biggest concern for security officers with 54% of those questioned expressing concerns about controlling how people accessed and used data, and enforcing security policies, and 15% worried about maintaining security while costs were being cut. Just under a third of organisations expect to reduce spending on security, with just under half expecting it to stay the same. 70% of those interviewed expect the overall IT budget to be reduced in the next year with only 15% saying it will stay unchanged.

Marc Hocking, Chief Technology Officer at Becrypt said, “As the Government continues to drive cost cutting measures in the coming years, Becrypt believes that we will see more and more public sector staff working from home and hot desking.

http://www.prlog.org/11447525-data-security-moves-up-the-agenda-is-now-seen-as-important-as-cost-savings-within-the-public-sect.html

At its heart, it refers to tools that track various changes made to an enterprise’s network defenses — principally firewall and router settings, as well as other security system data — and evaluates the potential impact of proposed changes.

SPOM (let’s use that term for now, since it’s the shortest and goodness knows we *need* another acronym) is sometimes referred to as the “preventative” side of security monitoring because it focuses on how enterprises are enforcing their security policies –and what might happen if they change those policies. This separates SPOM from security information and event management (SIEM), which reports on security-related network activity after it occurs.

“SIEM is a useful tool, but although it’s been around for years, enterprises are finding that their risk is continuing to rise,” says Michelle Cobb, vice president of marketing at Skybox. “It’s collecting data after the fact — after the horse is out of the barn… What we try to do is reduce the window of risk, reducing the possibility that a bad ‘event’ will occur in the first place.”

Unlike SIEM, SPOM enables an enterprise to set an acceptable level of risk and then tune its security systems and configurations to meet that requirement.

Steve Dauber, vice president of marketing at RedSeal Systems, compared the current evolution of security management systems to the evolution of network management systems a decade ago.

“First we had element management systems that collected data from individual devices,” he recalled.

“Then we had enterprise network management systems that collected all the data from the element management systems into a single console, which is basically what SIEM does.

After that, we saw the development of correlation engines, change management, and service-level management, which allowed you to intelligently set specific service levels for critical applications and business services.

SPOM is sort of the service-level management of security — but you’re using risk as the variable, rather than network performance or uptime.” At the core of most SPOM systems is the task of firewall configuration, which is how most enterprises “tune” their level of risk. Coordinating these policies and changes across a whole network of firewalls is no simple task, which is why Tufin’s products are designed to monitor changes in real time, according to Ruvi Kitov, CEO of Tufin.

While the SPOM concept certainly sounds like an attractive one for enterprises that must manage policies and configurations across many firewalls and other security devices, the market for the technology remains nascent. “I think the need for these products is real, but I suspect that many organizations are put off by the associated price tag,” says Andrew Hay, senior analyst for the enterprise security practice at the 451 Group consultancy.

SPOM technology is generally targeted at large enterprises, where collecting and analyzing configuration and management data from a variety of security devices can be daunting. “Obviously, if you have hundreds of firewalls, that price is going to go up. But when you compare it to the cost of a breach, which may be $200,000 or more on average, it’s a pretty good investment.”

RedSeal and Skybox tools are also heavily used by operations staff, but they can also be used to create “dashboards” that allow top executives to monitor the enterprise’s security posture and evaluate potential risks.

“The vendors really should be leading with the compliance pitch,” he says.

http://www.darkreading.com/security_monitoring/security/management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227800007&cid=RSSfeed#comments

“These patterns are affected by many factors of relationship and context, and could be used in reverse — to infer the relationship and context.” The more involved the individual is in the “digital” community, the more valuable his or her information pattern becomes.

And because this illegal version of what amounts to a blackhat social CRM database doesn’t cause a computer or mobile device to crash or result in the immediate loss of an antivirus application or the theft of money from a bank account or a gift card, the surveillance would theoretically go unnoticed and therefore garner even more valuable and meaningful behavioral information as time passes. For starters, it would the kind of detailed information that advertisers, marketers and spammers would love to get their hands on but for now have to be content with mass, barnstorming-type email campaigns to accomplish.

http://www.ecrmguide.com/article.php/3908146/new-malware-wants-your-life-not-your-passwords.htm

As per the report, among those who have been already targeted, companies usually reported sustaining around 10 attacks in the last five years.

Cris Paden, a Symantec Spokesman stated that the Stuxnet worm was an instance that politically provoked attacks, while unusual, was real and could be successful, as reported by SCMagazineUS on October 7, 2010.

http://www.spamfighter.com/News-15211-Global-Critical-Infrastructure-Increasingly-Being-Penetrated-By-Cyber-Crooks.htm

These devices can be cell-phone switching systems, power grid controllers and HVAC systems, and they can also be network-equipped television sets, video disc players and DVRs. And we haven’t gotten to the mobile devices that people carry around, such as iPods, smartphones and GPS receivers. At first glance, it’s hard to see how these network-attached devices could threaten your enterprise, but on further inspection, networked devices are perhaps the single greatest area of risk in security today.

I was reminded of the nature of this threat when I was at Best Buy a couple of weeks ago shopping for a new television set. What I hadn’t expected was the flood of new consumer electronics that have reached the market lately boasting network connectivity. Every major vendor of televisions featured 802.11n wireless connectivity on some models, and some had wired Ethernet as well. There were network-aware Blu-ray players in all price ranges. None, as far as I could tell, included any sort of security.

The only reason I can think of that these devices haven’t been used as malware vectors is that the criminals who create malware haven’t gotten around to it. But there will come a time when some devices reach a critical mass, and—because of the unique vulnerability of these devices—start serving up attacks against your network or someone else’s.

In some ways the threat posed by mobile devices is even worse since they have a more direct connection to the Internet.

This is the future that Intel sees, and it’s why the company bought McAfee.

As nice as it might be to have a profitable business selling AV software, it will be a lot nicer for Intel to have the in-house expertise to create hardware-based security for as many of those network-equipped devices as it can supply network interfaces for. Because these devices are already connected, all Intel and McAfee need to do is create an ecosystem of device updating and reporting that not only keeps the protection current but also reports on emerging threats, much as McAfee’s current computer security products do.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Intel-McAfee-Merger-Plugs-Network-Security-Hole-696433/?kc=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RSS%2Feweeksecurity+%28eWEEK+Security%29