Category: Trends

Moreover, the successful hacking and distributed denial of service attacks now originate from Brazil, Russia, China and India, the mi2g Intelligence Unit reported in new research. The combined number of attacks — 5,682 — against the European countries far exceeds the overt digital attacks recorded against the United States (3,696) and Canada (209). Brazil, with 962 attacks, Turkey (549) and China (317) are the only non-Western countries in the top 10.

The mi2g report found that 55 per cent of all digital attacks in November were launched against small entities with a turnover below $7-million (U.S.). Only 1 per cent of all successful digital attacks in November were against larger entities with a turnover in excess of $40-million.

In terms of operating systems, Linux remained the most popular among hackers, according to mi2G, reflecting how popular Linux has become as a platform for Internet-connected computers and servers. Systems running the open-source system accounted for 61.7 per cent of all attacks. Microsoft Windows followed with 23.7 per cent.

But since most government computers run Microsoft systems, Windows servers in governmental operations registered a record high of 84.1 per cent of all successful digital attacks.

The mi2g report also estimated worldwide economic damage from hacker attacks, DDoS attacks, as well as virus, worm and spam proliferation at $166.7-billion to $203.75-billion, with the greatest damage coming from malware and spam.

More info: [url=http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20031128.gthacknov28/BNStory/Technology/]http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20031128.gthacknov28/BNStory/Technology/[/url]

In general, an unknown writer identifies a vulnerability in a common system, writes software to exploit it and releases it to his chums and the antivirus companies, sometimes into the wild. The virus is analysed, a unique pattern within it is identified and the antivirus companies release the update to their customers.

One approach to counter that is heuristic analysis, where software examines email attachments and incoming files and attempts to work out what they actually do. A more advanced form of heuristic scanning involves running the code, either in emulation or a virtual machine, and watching for dangerous activity.

Yet another approach is to monitor not the suspect code, but the entry points to the operating system: as software runs, the antivirus program constantly checks for dangerous activity.

One of the latest demonstrations comes from Washington University, where John Lockwood and his students have developed a device called the Field Programmable Port Extender (FPX) that can scan incoming bitstreams at up to 2.4 gigabits per second. The hardware builds incoming packets into a message, analyses the protocol headers and compares the contents of the message against a database of known signatures — all things that are normally done in software.

More info: [url=http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020415,39118047,00.htm]http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020415,39118047,00.htm[/url]

The research found 28 per cent of firms have implemented wireless infrastructures, while 40 per cent plan to do so by 2005, using Wep as the security standard rather than technologies such as virtual private networks.

“Security is still a concern, but the biggest danger isn’t enterprise deployment but deployment by an end-user,” he said.

Mike Smart, European product manager at SonicWall, said: “Relying on Wep or banning wireless usage is not enough to guarantee network integrity.”

More info: [url=http://www.vnunet.com/News/1150021]http://www.vnunet.com/News/1150021[/url]

“Earlier this year, we saw the security budgets in large organization increasing,” said Mark Lobel, the senior manager for security and privacy services at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and the author of the survey results.

“But we’re seeing these fast-growing companies not spending as consistently as their more mature brethren.

According to the survey, 46 percent of the fast-growing companies polled said they had been the victim of a recent security breach.

Hackers were cited as the source of 61 percent of the attacks, followed by e-mail at 27 percent.

Attacks by unauthorized users and employees, former employees, and competitors, however, accounted for more than 1 out of every 10 attacks.

Of those companies which admitted to a security breach, 83 percent reported at least some monetary loss — ranging from network downtime and lost or damaged customer records to direct financial losses and identity theft.

More info: [url=http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20031124S0008]http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20031124S0008[/url]

Singapore’s security solutions market is forecast to expand at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.2% to reach over US$430 million by 2007, said IT research house IDC in a statement.

Spending on security solutions in Asia Pacific, excluding Japan, is estimated to hit US$1.7b this year and grow 25 percent yearly to US$4.1b in 2007, IDC said.

Countries such as Australia, Korea, China will constitute the largest share of the security solutions market in terms of market value and actual spending, according to IDC.

More info: [url=http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/technologynews/view/58545/1html]http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/technologynews/view/58545/1html[/url]

In the end, what is left and what could be done as an emergency measure? I’m afraid there’s not much that can be done to approach 100% efficiency.

Probably one of the most promising security measures would be traffic shaping IDSes and communication between different ones. They still need a lot of improvement to prevent false positives, because false positives tend to bore administrators who then end up not listening to alerts anymore.

Full disclosure of vulnerabilities is surely a way of facilitating the task of exploit writing. On the other hand, imposing a total blackout on vulnerability discovery and disclosing it only to the vendor (or publisher) of a piece of software is surely a way of; 1- not inciting hackers to discover holes, and 2-having some hackers keep them for their group of friends to carry out their own exploits.

Good old solution: patch, patch, patch
Last word: patching a system as soon as a solution has been found to a security vulnerability has always been the best solution to avoid security problems.

More info: http[url=http://www.net-security.org/dl/articles/wf.pdf]://www.net-security.org/dl/articles/wf.pdf[/url]