CyberSecurity Institute

Conficker, a worm that started spreading among enterprise desktop systems in 2008, continues to wriggle through corporate networks. But the total number of infected systems shrank during 2012, according to the latest Security Intelligence Report released by Microsoft on April 17.

“In the last quarter of 2012, a person in the enterprise was more likely to encounter attacks through the Web than any of the network worms,” Holly Stewart, senior program manager with the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, told eWEEK.

Link: http://www.eweek.com/security/microsoft-says-worm-infections-declining-but-web-attacks-rising/

Simply put, a “watering hole” attack uses a trusted website as a base to divert visitors to an unsafe, malicious website, where malware can then take advantage of vulnerabilities within a PC system to steal data.

The report suggests that industrial espionage is on the rise, and manufacturing is now the most attractive target for those looking to steal valuable data, accounting for 24 percent of targeted attacks.

As social media spam rises, traditional spam has declined slightly from 75 percent of all email sent in 2011 to 69 percent last year — although 30 billion are still sent every day.

“This year’s ISTR shows that cybercriminals aren’t slowing down, and they continue to devise new ways to steal information from organizations of all sizes,” said Stephen Trilling, chief technology officer of Symantec.

Link: http://www.zdnet.com/symantec-industrial-espionage-on-the-rise-smbs-a-target-7000014061/

The services are also driving changes in the market landscape, particularly around a number of key security technology areas, such as secure email and secure Web gateways, remote vulnerability assessment, and Identity and Access Management (IAM).

“Demand remains high from buyers looking to cloud-based security services to address a lack of staff or skills, reduce costs, or comply with security regulations quickly,” said Eric Ahlm, research director at Gartner. “This shift in buying behavior from the more traditional on-premises equipment toward cloud-based delivery models offers good opportunities for technology and service providers with cloud delivery capabilities, but those without such capabilities need to act quickly to adapt to this competitive threat.”

Security buyers from the U.S. and Europe, representing a cross section of industries and company sizes, stated that they plan to increase the consumption of several common cloud services during the next 12 months.

Gartner believes regulatory compliance measures to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), for example, are driving much of the growth of interest in tokenization as a service.

Much of the interest is attributed to regulatory compliance concerns and security buyers’ need to reduce costs in the area of log management, compliance reporting and security event monitoring. However, many customers in the enterprise segment will remain cautious about sending sensitive log information to cloud services, and this will continue to be an important aspect for security-as-a-service providers to address.

“The customer demand for a brokerage becomes apparent as organizations move more assets to the cloud and require multiple security services to span multiple clouds and/or mixtures of clouds and on-premises.”

Gartner is advising value-added resellers (VARs) to supplement product implementations with cloud-based alternatives that offer large customers reduced operational cost and thereby increase the likelihood of customer retention in this market segment.

Link: http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=14748