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Eager IT Leaders Could Swallow Security Industry

Posted on May 2, 2006December 30, 2021 by admini

“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

Viruses no longer top security threat

Posted on May 2, 2006December 30, 2021 by admini

“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

Cingular Turns to McAfee to Protect Smartphones

Posted on May 2, 2006December 30, 2021 by admini

Kounestsov said, “The operator recognizes the importance of this technology, and works with us to provide it.

With McAfee VirusScan Mobile, they’ve taken it to other platforms and shipped it as an aftermarket solution; maintaining the same core technology to provide security functionality to the network operator and the enterprise. And while you can conceptually compare it to anti-virus or anti-spyware and all sorts of anti-malware for the desktop, the intent is to give operator or enterprise – not necessarily the end user – full control of what’s happening on the device.

AVERT Labs predicted a huge increase in mobile threats; up to about 726 from 226 from 2005. McAfee predicted that the damage caused by new mobile threats is likely to be more extensive than those caused by today’s PC threats because of the large volume of smartphones and the small percentage that are protected by mobile security. For example, in 2004, the ‘I Love You’ virus penetrated tens of millions of PCs in just a couple of hours despite the fact that half of all PCs had Internet security software installed.

By comparison, a mobile threat targeting several operating systems could infect up to 200 million connected smartphones simultaneously because the majority of these devices don’t include anti-virus protection.

http://www.pocketpccity.com/articles/2006/5/2006-5-1-Cingular-Turns-to.html

Wireless Vendors Tout Security, VoIP At Interop

Posted on May 2, 2006December 30, 2021 by admini

Meru Networks is targeting enterprise wireless deployments with its Wireless Backbone System and announcing its latest round of funding, while Trapeze Networks is launching new network access control features and demonstrating new Wi-Fi/cellular convergence. “For the channel, it’s not a sale of a small number of access points and controllers but [it] becomes an opportunity to provide an end-to-end wireless infrastructure,” said Ihab Abu-Hakima, president and CEO of Meru, Sunnyvale, Calif. The Radio Switch attached to the core switch then communicate wirelessly to other Radio Switches on the network, which in turn connect wirelessly to Meru Access Points. The company this week also is disclosing that it has secured its fourth round of funding, with a $25 million investment led by Lehman Brothers Venture Partners.

Aruba Networks, meanwhile, is teaming with AirMagnet to incorporate troubleshooting tools into its WLAN platform, and wireless telephony vendor SpectraLink is demonstrating interoperability between its handsets and WLAN products from Meru and the Asterisk open-source VoIP platform. Enterprise adoption of voice over WLAN is gaining strong traction, said Geri Mitchell-Brown, Wi-Fi stragist at the Boulder, Colo.-based company.

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187002329&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News

U.K. Cabinet Office backs security enhanced Linux

Posted on May 2, 2006December 30, 2021 by admini

“We consider MAC to be a key enabling technology to aid government and businesses alike, in being confident they can deliver more services, more quickly, and with better function, without compromising security,” said Marsh.

Gary Barnett, research director at Ovum, said the announcement shows the potential of public-private partnerships. “This is an important announcement that shows how both government and business can take security to the next level”, said Barnett. “The traditional ‘border control’ approach to security will no longer be good enough as organizations, including government, are increasingly obliged to grant access to internal systems to a wider range of external parties.

MAC addresses this issue by applying the ‘need to know’ security principle to operating systems, this means that rogue applications or malicious users are automatically contained and cannot cause damage beyond their immediate context.

SELinux is the first commercially available operating system to implement this sophisticated level of security, and today’s announcement shows how this can be combined with a commercial J2EE application server to form the basis of a complete solution,” added Barnett. Enterprises will also be able to take advantage of the technology, said Doc Shankar, worldwide Linux security lead for IBM. “What we’ve demonstrated here with WebSphere and SELinux can be repeated with other software such as DB2 and business applications. In other words through the use of this technology, any organization will have the ability to contain hackers, provide the necessary confinement for its applications and minimize damage to the enterprise,” said Shankar.

The proof of concept is planned to go live this month at County Durham & Darlington Acute Hospitals NHS Trust and will focus on providing secure system access for the hospital’s new finance system.

http://www.scmagazine.com/uk/news/article/556670/uk+cabinet+office+backs+security+enhanced+linux/

Info. assurance a matter of survival

Posted on May 2, 2006December 30, 2021 by admini

The size of the problem is breathtaking, with 20 million e-mails a minute zipping around the globe and 40 million voicemails left each hour.

And supervisory control and data acquisition networks, used throughout the chemical and utilities industries, were developed years before the Internet and never designed to include computer security.

“Our operations, organizations, laws and policies have not kept pace with this changing technology,” Miller said.

http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/40663-1.html