Category: Trends

Seventy-eight percent of 75 senior IT and business continuity professionals (8 percent of whom represent financial services organizations) surveyed report that their organizations have installed or are in the process of upgrading technology to support telecommuting or remote customer access in case of a disaster. However, only 9 percent of…

“It’s back to the future with some of this,” says Andrew Jaquith, program manager for security research at the Yankee Group. Jaquith says the current approach of identifying and blocking the bad is starting to fail, with malware samples increasing at a rate of around 50 percent annually. “Whitelisting is increasingly becoming part of a well-balanced diet on the client,” he says.

And it’s quietly and slowly catching on beyond vendors such as SecureWave, Savant Protection, and Bit9 that have made a business out of whitelisting applications.

Many of the early whitelisting adopters today are small- to medium-sized organizations, where deploying this technology across desktops wouldn’t be as major an undertaking at say, a major Fortune 100 company. SourceMedia has been testing Savant Protection’s endpoint software with whitelisting for several months. “Conceptually, it makes a ton of sense,” says Ivan Latanision, vice president of information technology for SourceMedia, who adds the company hasn’t made its final decision on whether to purchase the tool yet.

Savant uses unique cryptographic algorithms and signature keys for each application on each desktop, rather than a server-based access control list. Patton Harris Rust & Associates has been running SecureWave’s Sanctuary software for whitelisting since last year — initially for device control and later for application control as well. John Loyd, vice president and director of IT for PHR&A, says the company installed the software for protection against zero-day attacks, ensuring its users aren’t installing illegal software, and to ensure the quality of apps its engineers use. Dennis Szerszen, vice president of marketing and corporate strategy of SecureWave, says antivirus blacklisting and Sanctuary’s whitelisting work best together. “We need to be triggering the AV processes so they can clean up what” they found.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=107320&WT.svl=news2_1

For example, many companies are maxing out the power equipment in their data centers, which is needed to run and cool computing gear.

Virtualization technology will allow customers to potentially power down under-used resources and consolidate the computing load on other servers, Douglas said.

In addition, Sun is in negotiations with several utility providers in the United States to replicate a rebate program around Sun servers that the company established with California’s Pacific Gas and Electric, he said.

http://news.com.com/Data+centers+eye+power+costs/2100-1015_3-6124586.html?tag=nefd.top

The creators of these kits openly boast how well their code evades anti-virus scanners, and advertise exploits of both long-patched and unpatched vulnerabilities in browsers, particularly Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

One group, for instance, was the first to exploit the late-2005 WMF (Windows Metafile) bug, while the WebAttacker makers jumped on the VML (Vector Markup Language) vulnerability last month.

Nuclear Grabber, on the other hand, is often paired with WebAttacker — the latter is used to install a rootkit of browser helper object on a vulnerable PC — and then sends any information typed into a Web form to not only the real (and legitimate) destination, but also to the criminal.

There’s even a kit for phishing thugs, dubbed “Rock Phish Kit,” that targets cyber-crooks who don’t know how to craft a fake Web site. The kit, which Websense first spotted in November 2005, only offered 2 or three bogus branded sites when it started to sell, but now packages as many as 15 or 20, all of which can be hosted on a single server. The result of kit selling has been to boost the volume of malicious sites and the speed with which unpatched, or “zero-day” vulnerabilities, are put to work by a large number of cyber-criminals, said Hubbard.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=105163&WT.svl=cmpnews1_1

Customers want to have a smaller set of vendors accountable if their technology fails to keep information secure and in compliance with regulations–and large systems and storage companies have the financial clout to act as consolidators. “They have the ability to do the potential M&A (mergers and acquisition) deals in cash, or are large enough to do them with stock, or a combination of both,” MacLeod said.

Prior to their acquisition announcements, ISS and RSA Security, for example, had long been rumored to be potential buyout candidates. Other names analysts point to on a short list of potential targets include Trend Micro, Check Point Software Technologies, McAfee and Secure Computing.

“On one side, you have companies like Cisco (Systems) and Microsoft that will discount the price they charge for security, and on the other side, you have the best-of-breed (niche security) companies,” Kuper said.

Buyers don’t want the consumer side, so maybe it could take the consumer piece private and sell the enterprise business,” said one security analyst, who requested anonymity.

http://news.com.com/Security+firms+jump+in+the+acquisition+pool/2100-7350_3-6121403.html?tag=nefd.lede

“Organisations and the individuals they employ have to take mobile security seriously while still ensuring that they can take advantage of the benefits,” said the report.

However, the study concluded that if security is managed properly, the risks are acceptable given the possible gains for a company.

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2165203/managers-snub-mobile-security