‘Cyber terrorism’: Don’t believe the hype says Gartner

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The comments came during a media round-table session at the Gartner Symposium and IT Expo, which began today in Sydney, Australia.

The director, Rich Mogull, told journalists that despite the incidence of high profile digital attacks, cyber terrorism is a phenomenon that has never occurred.

Even though there were examples of attacks that have physical consequences – they could not be described as terrorist acts, Mogull explained.

Mogull maintains the argument is largely academic – it doesn’t matter who’s attacking an organisation, it should be doing the best it can to protect itself in the first place, whether attacks are coming from criminals or “cyber terrorists”.

Let’s look at protecting ourselves by closing the vulnerabilities we know exist, and protecting ourselves from the attacks that we know exist,” he said.

More info: [url=http://www.silicon.com/management/government/0,39024677,39116842,00.htm?foo=’Cyber%20terrorism’:%20Don’t%20believe%20the%20hype%20says%20Gartner%2011–11]http://www.silicon.com/management/government/0,39024677,39116842,00.htm?foo=’Cyber%20terrorism’:%20Don’t%20believe%20the%20hype%20says%20Gartner%2011–11[/url]

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Security Incidents Are Holding Steady

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The bad news is that attackers are still primarily exploiting known operating-system and application vulnerabilities to hack into systems.

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In InformationWeek’s 2003 U.S. Information Security Survey, only 21% of the 815 companies surveyed say their systems were attacked via “unknown” operating-system vulnerabilities.

Many IT professionals complain that hackers, security researchers, and security vendors who find and disclose software vulnerabilities are just seeking name recognition and free publicity.

Every big worm that has struck so far has exploited a software vulnerability that had previously been discovered and had a patch available to fix it.

As painful as patching is, and despite the toll it takes on system administrators and developers, it may not be as bad as walking into the data center one morning to discover that a worm is tearing its way through the Internet and your systems and that it will be days before anyone figures out how to counter it.

Software and application vulnerabilities aren’t the only programs prone to security attacks. Hackers also are making use of personal identification numbers, account permissions, and valid user passwords, all established to restrict access, in their campaigns.

Of the 815 business-technology and security pros who participated in InformationWeek’s U.S. Information Security Survey this year, nearly one-fourth experienced security incidents involving valid user accounts or permissions.

While nearly one-fourth of the sites surveyed by InformationWeek report recently falling victim to externally waged denial-of-service attacks, 3% report attacks that came from within their firewalls.

More info: [url=http://www.securitypipeline.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=16100051]http://www.securitypipeline.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=16100051[/url]

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Security execs form advisory group

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Called the Global Council of CSOs, the group will bring together chief security officers from nine companies and one government agency.

The Council will offer advice, publish security recommendations, work with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and help ensure that corporate America is ready to respond to Internet attacks, according to sources who asked not to be named.

The sole initial government representative will be Will Pelgrin, the director of cybersecurity and critical infrastructure for New York state.

More info: [url=http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5105962.html ]http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5105962.html[/url]

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Dell integrates with Microsoft management tools

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In customer surveys, Dell has found that “patching and upgrading systems is the most important thing they (IT managers) can do at this time for security reasons and to keep their systems up to date,” Hand added.

The Management and Update packages are available now; the Deployment Toolkit will arrive by the end of the year.

More info: [url=http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103_2-5105647.html]http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103_2-5105647.html[/url]

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Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 goes gold

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Scheduled to be available by the end of 2003, Microsoft Virtual PC offers customers a cost-effective safety net to ease their migration to Microsoft Windows XP Professional and a tool to help accelerate the development, testing, deployment and support of PC applications.

Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 allows enterprise customers to run multiple operating systems on one PC, so employees can run critical legacy applications on an interim basis while information technology (IT) professionals proceed with the migration to Windows XP Professional.

Key features carried over from the former Connectix product include Virtual Machine Additions, which provides a high level of integration between host and guest operating systems, including integrated mouse, time synchronization, cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop, and folder sharing; Undo Disks, which allows users to delete any changes they make to the virtual hard disk during a session; and Differencing Disks, which lets multiple users and multiple virtual machines use the same parent virtual hard disk at the same time.

This extensive compatibility positions customers to migrate legacy applications and consolidate desktops for dramatic cost savings.

More info: [url=http://news.designtechnica.com/article1811.html]http://news.designtechnica.com/article1811.html[/url]

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