Author: admini

“In future, networks will need automatic systems that will be able to respond to virus attacks within seconds to prevent serious damage”, he told customers and partners of Cisco Systems and Internet Solutions in Bryanston yesterday.

Van Gend says there is a very high level of security awareness in South Africa, but like the rest of the world, many decision makers do not realise the scale of the risk.

He emphasises the importance of protecting networks against the unknown and says Cisco has found that the most effective way of doing that is by using host based intrusion detection, “which is proactive rather than being merely reactive like most other security systems.”

“Although the virus is present on the network, host-based intrusion detection as implemented by Cisco means that viruses can be prevented from executing until the necessary patches can be applied in a controlled and more cost effective way.”

More info: [url=http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/computing/2003/0310311051.asp?A=SEC&S=Security&O=FPT]http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/computing/2003/0310311051.asp?A=SEC&S=Security&O=FPT[/url]

Corporate security is more of a strategic issue than a technological battle, and chief security officers should be treated as trusted experts by boards, delegates at the Compsec 2003 were told last week.

Outsourcing, email management and financial or regulatory pressures such as Basel II in Europe and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US have driven this approach, the security conference heard.

“The chief security officer should now be positioned as a trusted advisor to the business, moving away from operational delivery towards understanding and managing risk,” said Phillip Gregory, head of UK security at financal services firm Norwich Union.

Security is less about technology and more about establishing consistency in the processes and procedures that the technology supports, he added.

Identify issues early, raise awareness of your requirement and become part of the process,” he said.

Ian Angell, information systems professor at the London School of Economics, repeated warnings to spend more time on due process and less on technology as a panacea.

However, success and failure will be determined by unique social, political, organisational, and particularly personal factors, not just the functional.”

More info: [url=http://www.vnunet.com/News/1147007]http://www.vnunet.com/News/1147007[/url]

802.1X requires support in the client via the operating system or a third-party software application; in the access point, through the ability to accept EAP (extensible authentication protocol) messages and hand them off to a RADIUS or other authentication server defined in some area of the access point’s configuration; and an authentication server that can respond with the right information to initiate the keying process after credentials are accepted.

None of these requirements is a high bar.

Windows XP has shipped with an 802.1X client for some time, although it only supports a couple of flavors of secured EAP, in which the credential exchange is encrypted within tunnels.

And virtually all mainstream RADIUS and similar servers are now equipped to talk 802.1X/EAP using various secured EAP methods.

The client is the weak point, because until last week, only Windows XP had a built-in 802.1X client.

Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) now includes 802.1X support, and they feature all of the EAP types, including PEAP, LEAP, EAP-TLS, EAP-TTLS, and MD5.

(Because it’s a Mac, if you’re using a certificate-based EAP method, like EAP-TLS, you just drag a certificate from email into the Keychain program, and that’s that.)

Other platforms and other versions of operating systems aren’t out of luck because they can turn to Meetinghouse, which supports flavors of Windows and Mac OS X (before 10.3), as well as Linux 2.4 and Solaris.

WPA has driven this process faster, it seems to me, because WPA solves the key-changing problem.

With WPA, an 802.1X system could change keys every few minutes — or weeks or years potentially — without any reduction in the level of security even with the TKIP key that’s available as part of the WPA standard.

Another element driving 802.1X adoption is that it reduces VPN costs.

If you’re using a wireless-outside-the-firewall approach that requires a VPN client on the local network to tunnel through, you can completely eliminate the VPN client and per-seat server costs.

More info: [url=http://wifinetnews.com/archives/002434.html]http://wifinetnews.com/archives/002434.html[/url]

HP revealed this week that it had used the approach to protect thousands of machines on its network two days before the Blaster worm struck.

The code, developed by HP’s security research labs in Bristol, effectively saved the company from an infection that cost organisations around the world hundreds of millions of pounds to fix.

Although the technology is still at an early stage, HP sees it as a potential solution to the difficulties companies face ensuring all the machines on their network are patched, often at short notice, against the latest vulnerabilities.

Martin Sadler, lab director at HP laboratories in Bristol, said, “Tracking kit in any large corporation is difficult.

HP has 250,000 devices connected to its network that we know of.

But we do not necessarily know where everything is.”

HP began developing the technology two years ago, when it deployed virus-like code to protect its IT systems from the Nimda virus.

The code delivered a pop-up message to every unpatched machine on the firm’s network, urging the user to take action.

In the case of Blaster, instead of a pop-up warning, the security labs arranged for a code to be pumped out to every IP address on the company’s network that shut down any machine that had not been patched.

Some users were upset but the code protected HP from infection.

Sadler said the technology was still at an early stage, and there were still many questions that had to be resolved before the technique could be used commercially.

Companies using the technology would have to weigh-up the risk of virus-like code designed to protect against new vulnerabilities falling into the wrong hands and being used to develop malicious code with devastating payloads.

More info: [url=http://www.computerweekly.com/articles/article.asp?liArticleID=126146&liArticleTypeID=1&liCategoryID=2&liChannelID=22&liFlavourID=1&sSearch=&nPage=1]http://www.computerweekly.com/articles/article.asp?liArticleID=126146&liArticleTypeID=1&liCategoryID=2&liChannelID=22&liFlavourID=1&sSearch=&nPage=1[/url]