Category: Trends

And resellers that are trying to stay ahead of the curve may find that some of their most innovative solutions come from a surprising source: their customers.

A plurality of small (31 percent) and midsize VARs (27 percent) see network connectivity as the most innovative security area. Among large VARs, 20 percent cited identity management. But network access, identity management and threat management are viewed as being creative in their own way. Meanwhile, small VARs (23 percent) are anticipating the most innovative gains to be made in threat management in the coming year, while midsize (21 percent) and large VARs (27 percent) see identity management as the hotspot.

One thing resellers of any size generally agree on is that the most useful new security features are ease of updating and automated responses to threats, and the majority of them also feel that the most innovative solutions arise from vendors and solution providers working closely together.

The trick for resellers is to figure out what counterthreats they have in their arsenals. While vendors work away in their labs to create new products, security solution providers are finding that they can be most innovative by creating services for their customers that knit together disparate technologies, whether from one vendor or several different ones.

CSCI, a networking and security solution provider in San Diego, has spent the past few years aggressively building its managed-services practice to complement its product business. One project that Juniper has fleshed out is a sort of matchmaking system in which it pairs VARs with other technology partners wherever they identify a potential fit. Recently, the vendor introduced CSCI to security-services powerhouse VeriSign, allowing the two to create an SMB security-services suite.

http://www.varbusiness.com/sections/technology/tech.jhtml;jsessionid=LBUAOBCWUCKCGQSNDBECKICCJUMEKJVN?articleId=187900121&printableArticle=true

The US With a high number of Internet connections and a rich history of Web- and computer-literate criminals, the US is understandably the major focus for much of the discussion into the current global problem of cyber crime. For example, according to Spamhaus, the US is not only responsible for more spam than any other nation, it is actually far worse than the rest of the current top 10 put together.

Though much US spam has traditionally travelled via China, the US does certainly harbour some of the most prolific spammers in the world, as well as the world’s three worst ISPs for relaying spam, says Spamhaus.

That ISP figure points towards a hidden menace which further blurs the boundaries of cyber crime — the sheer number of PCs that have been compromised and are churning out spam and malware unbeknownst to their owners.

China China leads the way in terms of originating Internet attacks, accounting for just over one-quarter of all reports last year of Internet attacks and probes, according to Kaspersky Labs.

Russia and the Baltic States Despite the popular myth that ‘The Russians’ are the greatest threat to Internet security, Russia accounted for only two percent of Internet attacks and probes last year. The eponymous founder of Kaspersky Labs blames the stereotype on the American media, suggesting propaganda and political point-scoring has done little to paint a clearer picture of which countries are responsible for what kinds of attacks. Nonetheless, the reputation of Russia and the Baltic States has certainly been tarnished in recent years by a growing trend towards blackmail with threats of denial of service attacks.

And while this is in no way unique to these parts of the former Soviet Union — as all crimes, if successful, will develop a global appeal — experts claim it is a crime that was pioneered in the region — though targets were often based in the US or Western Europe.

Europe also has a very active hacker network and recent years have seen a number of European virus writers arrested in relation to serious attacks. As with the US, Europe is also guilty of relaying a great deal of malware infections via unguarded home PCs and large ISPs, though this may see Europeans cast as the ‘mule’ rather than the criminal at source.

Take West Africa, which has become synonymous with electronic fraud in the wake of so-called 419 e-mail scams and other Internet-based fraud originating from Nigeria.

South America has seen many instances of Web site defacements and although these are a worldwide problem it is certainly a hotbed for this type of activity.

In less politically stable regions, such as the Middle East, we have seen several Web sites vandalised as well as sites defaced with a political message — often called ‘hacktivism’, though this is small scale and lacks the severity of impact that other attacks have. Similarly the use of Trojans and other spying technologies appears to have found some popularity in Israel but again it is far from unique to the one country.

In conclusion, while it is worth identifying the most obvious and most serious trends in global cyber crime, we must realise it is never going to be as straightforward as assuming the battle lines are drawn as clearly as the national boundaries on the map.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/security/soa/A_globetrotter_s_guide_to_cyber_crime/0,39023764,39255969,00.htm

“While email worms occupy the top spots, it’s clear that Trojans represent by far the most prominent threat to IT security,” said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos.

Netsky is still the most common virus seen online, accounting for about one in five of all viruses despite a fix and removal tools being widely available for more than two years.

“The expected reign of IM worms has not arrived because virus authors are confronted with a fundamental barrier when engineering an IM worm,” stated Fortinet’s report. “While email addresses are easy to collect on the web, instant messaging IDs are generally less public, making the seeding process significantly harder to set up.”

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2155151/viruses-longer-top-threat-april

“I think some people were still scratching their heads when we bought Authentica, but certainly not our customers,” said Dennis Hoffman, EMC’s vice president of information security for EMC, based in Hopkinton, Mass. “Customers are asking all the major platform providers to build security into their technologies, and we will absolutely invest, partner and when possible, acquire, to continue to build out information security in our own products.”

Hoffman said enterprises will likely always seek some form of help from independent, third-party security applications vendors, but that he believes end users have tired of the need to acquire additional technologies for protecting almost every form of IT.

Some analysts are predicting that the trend toward large IT platform providers developing greater security features will only accelerate a torrent of industry consolidation among anti-malware and network defense applications makers that could already be overdue.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1956656,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594

‘Build your own spyware’ kits are already commonplace on the internet in publicly available forums, leading to fears that ‘script kiddies’, technically unsophisticated users, could develop and distribute their own malware.

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2154824/spyware-evolving-faster-viruses

Novell announced Suse Linux Enterprise 10 at its Brainshare conference last month. Earlier the same month, at Cebit in Hanover, it announced its Enterprise Linux Desktop.
The aim is to give business users a desktop that does not require them to be Linux buffs, says Hovsepian. And also to add the functions that the business user expects from a proprietary operating system such as Windows.

“We have focused on interoperability, interfacing it with common directories like Active Directory and e-directory,” he says. Novell has transferred some of the macros from Excel to Open Office, easing transition. “We’ve focused on usability”, conducting focus groups through www.betterdesktop.org to identify problems for the typical user in Linux’s Gnome and KDE GUIs, says Hovsepian.Novell has sold security and identity management software, such as Novell Identity Manager, eDirectory and SecureLogin, for a number of years.

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/0/700D16BCCD690C4DCC257157000CDF5B?OpenDocument