The hard times for security professionals has many explanations, but one of the most significant trends this year has been the rise in so-called ‘blended’ threats, exploits that use multiple modes of infection — ranging from hacking and computer worms to denial-of-service attacks and Web site defacements — to create a single, advanced assault that overwhelms defenses.
Older threats such as Code Red and Nimba, and newer ones like Sobig and MS Blast, Weafer said, are perfect examples of such assaults, which have been steadily increasing for the past three years, but in 2003 really caught the attention of security professionals in their numbers and sophistication.
What makes blended threats so dangerous is that they’re much more difficult to defend against than, say, a single-vector exploit that propagates via e-mail or can be stopped by simply plugging a port at the network firewall.
In response, enterprises will have to implement a more comprehensive, in-depth defense that goes beyond the traditional firewall and anti-virus protection, and takes a more proactive approach.
Worse, an increasing number of those vulnerabilities can be exploited remotely — 80 percent at the moment — which means that hackers can more easily insert malicious code and wreck havoc on systems.
That’s one of the reasons why the window between the disclosure of a vulnerability and the release of exploit code — and then a self-replicated worm — continues to shrink.
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