admini – Page 350 – CyberSecurity Institute

Cisco boost security line-up by acquisition

Posted on October 21, 2004December 30, 2021 by admini

The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2005, which ends in January.

Perfigo’s CleanMachines products focus on policy analysis, compliance and access enforcement for PCs. Its technology fits into Cisco’s Network Admission Control (NAC) program, a security architecture that combines virus scanning with network policing to keep attacks from entering the network in the first place. Specifically, CleanMachines is pre-packaged admission control software that recognises users, their devices and roles. It evaluates the security standing of individual PCs and scans for vulnerabilities. Finally, it enforces policy in the network.

Cisco said that CleanMachines has shown great customer appeal in the small to midsized business market and is widely used in educational institutions. “This acquisition further enhances Cisco’s Self Defending Network security strategy of building and deploying proactive and advanced security into the network infrastructure,” Richard Palmer, vice-president in Cisco’s security technology group, said in a statement.

Cisco has been pushing its NAC architecture since last year. In June, it completed the first phase of the launch by making its IP routers NAC-ready. It plans to add the capability to its Ethernet switches and virtual private network concentrators in 2005.

Earlier this week, Cisco announced it is working with Microsoft, which has proposed a competing end-to-end security architecture called Network Access Protection. The two companies have pledged to make their architectures interoperable.

Cisco began building the NAC architecture through an acquisition last year. In January 2003, Cisco announced it would buy Okena in order to provide technology for the “trusted agent,” which sits on users’ PCs and communicates with the Cisco policy server. Last month, it announced the acquisition of Dynamicsoft, a session initiation protocol software developer, and NetSolve, a network management start-up.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/networks/0,39020345,39171015,00.htm

Exe Vaccine neutralizes untrusted executables

Posted on October 21, 2004December 30, 2021 by admini

The product takes aim at keyloggers, spyware and other malware that may be transparently installed while an unsuspecting user is downloading files.

Designed to run as a companion to the company’s Drive Vaccine product, Exe Vaccine is particularly useful for public-access environment computers such as those in schools, libraries, and public areas, Horizon Datasys said. Exe Vaccine is a monolithic kernel-mode driver that scans the system to detect all current executable files and places them on a write-protected list of allowed executables.

The Exe Vaccine control panel applet offers password access so that users cannot see the whitelist. There is no need for updates or definition files to keep the product current. The administrator can interrupt filtering from a control panel in order to install new software.

Once Exe Vaccine is installed and configured, it can be remotely installed on other computers in the network. It is compatible with Windows NT, 2000 and XP and with all anti-virus applications. The current version of Exe Vaccine is free to all users and comes with purchases of Drive Vaccine.

If Exe Vaccine is used separately, software support must be purchased to receive updated versions.

http://news.zdnet.com/2110-1009_22-5420891.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=zdnet

IBM jumps into Liberty Alliance

Posted on October 21, 2004December 30, 2021 by admini

The Liberty Alliance is a group of technology providers and corporations, such as Fidelity and American Express, that is developing a set of industry standards for verifying a person’s identity when he or she accesses Web sites. The consortium, which was founded by Sun Microsystems and others in 2001, has over 150 members now. IBM will also become a board member of Liberty and seek to find a common ground between the Liberty standards and an overlapping set of specifications that IBM backs, according to the company.

The computing giant’s Tivoli Access Manager security software already complies with Liberty. IBM added the support earlier this year. Until then, IBM had stayed clear of Liberty.

The company last year was a co-author of another technical specification, called WS-Federation, which was designed for many of the same tasks as the Liberty standards, such as verifying a network ID across several Web sites at once. However, in July, IBM signed a $50 million deal to build a single sign-on network for Orange, the mobile service provider of France Telecom, which is using Liberty-based software to offer network services to customers. The system will allow users of the Orange cellular network to sign on to the system using either a mobile phone or a personal computer.

With a single ID, the subscriber will be able to access services offered by France Telecom and its partners. The service will allow users to automatically retrieve passwords in a secure manner.

IBM said that it will continue to develop WS-Federation and related Web services security specifications, notably WS-Security. IBM said that it ultimately favors a single standardized method for so-called federated identity management.

Microsoft, too, has its own authentication service, called Passport.

But industry support for that service has never caught on widely and is used only in a limited way by Microsoft and its close partners.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5420814.html?tag=adnews

Microsoft Blogger: Replace Windows Passwords With Passphrases

Posted on October 21, 2004December 30, 2021 by admini

In a blog post titled “Why you shouldn’t be using passwords of any kind on your Windows networks”, Robert Hensing argues that the inclusion of password-cracking tools in recent worms and trojans illustrates the need for sturdier authentication schemes.

Hensing notes that Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 support passphrases of up to 127 characters, including spaces and unicode characters.

Some older Unix versions using the Data Encryption Standard (DES) only support passwords up to eight characters, or ignore any characters after the first eight.

Epps suggests an alternative method: select a passphrase, type out the first letter of each word, and any numbers and punctuation that come out of it.

Even longer passphrases are not immune to crackers who are persistent with dictionary attacks, powerful processors and social engineering, as noted in the passphrase FAQ, which emphasizes that good passphrases should be obscure. “The short version on common phrases is don’t use them ever,” it advises.

Microsoft will have more to say on passphrases, according to Hensing, whose blog post has been widely discussed on mailing lists in recent days.

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/10/21/microsoft_blogger_replace_windows_passwords_with_passphrases.html

Ex-staff pose threat to data

Posted on October 20, 2004December 30, 2021 by admini

The survey of 1,400 IT professionals shows that email access is the business tool most at risk when it came to ex-employees trying to access information remotely.

But confidential company documents, contact databases and administration systems were also at high-risk. ‘Firms need to build in rules saying what people can and can not access from the corporate network,’ said Thomas Raschke, IDC’s programme manager for European security products and strategies.

‘Access management is often an overlooked part of the business.’

http://www.vnunet.com/news/1158871

ATMs in peril from computer worms?

Posted on October 20, 2004December 30, 2021 by admini

Trend Micro and Computer Associates have both identified this niche, but some rivals question the immediate need for content filtering on cash points.

The new generation of Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) are migrating from the IBM OS/2 operating system to Microsoft Windows and IP networks. This saves costs and enhances customer services. But it also means that ATMs are now at risk from computer worms, according to Trend Micro. “Previously isolated cash machines can now be infected by self-launching network viruses via the banks’ IP networks. Infections have the potential to bring down ATM machines, incurring downtime, customer dissatisfaction and increased costs fixing infected machines,” it warns.

Last August, the Nachi (Welchia) worm contaminated the cash machines at two financial institutions. When the Slammer virus hit the back end systems of the Bank of America in January 2003, 13,000 US ATMs became unavailable.

But never fear, Trend Micro is on hand to offer assistance. The Japanese-based firm is launching hardware-based network worm filtering technology specially designed for ATMs at a conference later this month. As well as launching its Network VirusWall 300 hardware, Trend will also be exhibiting at the annual ATM security conference (ATM Sec 4) in London on 25 and 26 October. Raimund Genes, European president of Trend Micro, said that 70 per cent of ATMs are based on either XP or embedded XP. “That’s the way manufacturers are taking the ATM and ticketing machine market,” he said.

Computer Associates offers a software development kit that can be applied to systems based on embedded XP.

Genes argued that producing AV systems for embedded XP terminals is far from straightforward: using existing enterprise content filtering gateways to protect ATMs would be “overkill”. Hardware-based network worm filtering, such as Trend intends to launch offers a better approach, he argued.

But other security vendors question the need for the technology.

Nigel Hawthorn, of security appliance firm Blue Coat Systems, said that ATMs commonly operate on a separate physical network, which is closed. “Sasser hit the back-end systems of banks, not ATM machines,” he said. David Emm, senior technology consultant at anti-virus supplier Kaspersky, agrees. “The threat to ATMs is related to how closely they are integrated with the outside world. Normally ATMS are kept on separate systems. Online financial (ebanking) systems are far more at risk,” he said.

Trend’s Genes said the barriers between the network used by ATMs and the wider Internet are been lowered as banks switch from older telecoms technologies to IP-based networks. He acknowledged that widely deployed AV technology alone is failing to protect enterprises from fast-spreading worms. But Trend’s worm filtering tech would prove far more successful in keeping cashpoints up and running in the face of viral onslaught, he says.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/20/atm_viral_peril/