User error is the biggest threat on the Internet

Sophos unveiled a detailed assessment of the threat landscape - from hacktivism and online threats to mobile malware, cloud computing and social network security, as well as IT security trends for this coming year.


Year in review: Under attack

2011 was characterized by a rise in cybercrime. The availability of commercial tools designed by and for cybercriminals made mass generation of new malicious code campaigns and exploits trivial and scalable. The net result was significant growth in the volume of malware and infections.

Cybercriminals also diversified their targets to include new platforms, as business use of mobile devices accelerated. Politically motivated hacktivist groups took the media spotlight, even as the more common threats to cyber security grew.

Hype over hacktivism

The emergence of LulzSec and Anonymous marked a shift from hacking for financial gain to hacking as a form of protest. Hacktivists sowed chaos by leaking documents and attacking websites of high-profile organizations and even defense contractors. LulzSec dominated headlines in the first half of the year with attacks on Sony, PBS, the U.S. Senate, the CIA, FBI affiliate InfraGard and others, and then disbanded after 50 days.

Risky business

Increasingly, corporate users weren’t just at home or at work, but somewhere else on the “everywhere network.” And the consumerization of IT, sometimes called “bring your own device” or BYOD, became one of the newer causes of data vulnerability. Employees accessed sensitive corporate information from their home computers, smartphones and tablets. Moreover, corporate-issued mobile devices increased risk, as did the rise of cloud services and the use of social media.

According to the Sophos online poll, which asked users if their company allows personal laptops, desktops or phones for work, nearly 50 percent of respondents said yes. Another 10 percent who said their company doesn’t allow personal devices for work preferred they did.

Changing web threats and drive-by downloads

Cybercriminals constantly launched attacks designed to penetrate digital defenses and steal sensitive data. Almost no online portal proved immune from threat or harm. SophosLabs identifies an average of 30,000 newly-infected web pages each day. More than 80 percent of these web pages are on innocent web servers, which have been hacked by cybercriminals to make them part of the problem.

Additionally, 85 percent of all malware, including viruses, worms, spyware, adware and Trojans, comes from the web, according to the Ponemon Institute. Today, drive-by downloads have become the top web threat, and in 2011, one crimeware kit, known as “Blackhole,” rose to the number one on that list.

In the Sophos online poll, users were asked about the prevalence of malware compared to 2010; 67 percent of respondents felt it was on the rise.

The emergence of Mac malware

Microsoft Windows may be the most attacked OS, but the primary vectors for hacking Windows have been through PDF or Flash. Despite Microsoft’s regular updates to patch Windows OS vulnerabilities, the content delivery systems remained the largest vulnerability on any OS. In 2011, the emergence of malware for the Mac upstaged Windows malware. There's no doubt that the Windows malware problem is much larger than the Mac threat, but the events of 2011 show Mac users that the malware threat is genuine.

Top trends

There are many factors that will impact the IT security landscape this year and into the future. These include new attacks using social media platforms and integrated apps, more targeted attacks on non-Windows platforms, and mobile payment technologies under threat, among others which are highlighted within the report.

“As cybercriminals expand their focus, organizations are challenged to keep their security capabilities from backsliding as they adopt new technologies,” said Mark Harris, vice president of SophosLabs, Sophos. “And as we continue to access information in different ways, from different devices in different locations, security tools must be able to ‘protect everywhere’ - from desktops to mobile and smart devices and the cloud. But more importantly and oft-disregarded, cybercriminals will continue to stalk the easiest prey - security basics like patching and password management will remain a significant challenge.” 

 

Source: http://bit.ly/yjrHYu

Twitter users beware: Homeland Security isn’t laughing

Planning to make a joke on Twitter about bombing something? You might want to reconsider: according to a report from Britain, two British tourists were detained and then denied entry into the U.S. recently after they joked about destroying America and digging up Marilyn Monroe. The fact that the Department of Homeland Security and other authorities — including the FBI — are monitoring social media like Twitter and Facebook isn’t that surprising. But the fact that Homeland Security is willing to detain people based on what is clearly a harmless joke raises questions about what the impact of all that monitoring will be.

Leigh Van Bryan, a 26-year-old bar manager from Coventry, told The Sun that he and friend Emily Bunting were stopped by border guards when they arrived at Los Angeles International Airport and questioned for five hours about messages that Van Bryan had posted on Twitter saying he planned to “destroy America.” After the questioning, during which the Irish traveller said that Homeland Security threatened the two, they were put in a van and taken to a holding cell overnight, along with some illegal immigrants. After being held overnight, they said they were forced to take a plane back to England.

According to a report in The Daily Mail, the Homeland Security officers gave Van Bryan a document that detailed why he was refused admission to the United States, and it reads like a bad joke itself, saying:

He had posted on his Tweeter website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe… Also on his tweeter account Mr Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America.

Van Bryan told the newspaper that he tried to explain to Homeland Security officials that the term “destroy” was British slang referring to a party, and that his comments about “digging up Marilyn Monroe” were an attempt at humor, but that the officers didn’t listen. The authorities even searched their luggage looking for shovels and other tools, he said.

Monitoring social media makes sense — within reason

This isn’t the first time that someone has gotten in trouble for making a joke on Twitter: a British businessman named Paul Chambers was arrested under the Terrorism Act and questioned for more than seven hours in 2010 after making a joke on Twitter about blowing up an airport, a joke he said he made because he was frustrated about the airport being closed due to bad weather. He was tried and found guilty and fined a thousand pounds, and eventually lost his job as a result of the publicity.

The fact that Homeland Security is monitoring social networks like Twitter and Facebook for certain keywords isn’t that surprising: the department said during a security review earlier this year that it has been monitoring those networks and a list of blogs and other sources (including WikiLeaks) for information about potential security hazards and what it called “situational awareness.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation also recently revealed that it is trying to develop a service that can monitor social-media sources and automatically create alerts based on the information it finds there.

To me, it makes perfect sense for security officials to be monitoring social networks and even blogs. This is all public information that could contain useful signals about real terrorism or threats to national security of some kind, and it should obviously be part of the normal intelligence process. But doing this properly also requires some sense of proportion about what constitutes a real threat and what is clearly a joke. Did Homeland Security really think that a 26-year-old bar manager was a serious threat?

We all know that we are likely being monitored in even more ways now than we have ever been, whether it’s by security cameras or algorithms that comb through tweets and Facebook posts. But that’s not the scary part — the scary part is what can happen when that information gets misinterpreted and it escalates into a major crisis for no reason.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Stefan and Rosaura Ochoa

Source:  http://goo.gl/qY8CI

5 reasons to enforce email monitoring

Managing storage continues to be one of the most significant challenges for email management, but the right tools can change this from a daily headache to an easy win. Email monitoring gives administrators those tools; providing detailed information on how email is being used, both internally and externally. Here’s a list of the top five ways email monitoring will empower you to optimize your email management.

1. Identify heavy users

Knowing who the heaviest users are can help you plan storage, reallocate mailboxes amongst databases to streamline backups, and also learn about who is emailing whom, both within and outside the company. Knowing your communications channels can help you better understand the business and the needs of your customers while helping you with email management, email management tools can provide you with detailed reports on who sends and/or receives the most email, and who they are communicating with.

2. Manage those attachments

A single word document can take up more space than a hundred plain text emails. And how many different versions of a project plan are floating around inside your mailstores because each revision gets mailed out to everyone on the project team? Email is a convenient, but inefficient file server, and most attachments should really be on stored on SharePoint or a network drive. Moving file transfers to the proper resource will make email management a much easier task. Email monitoring software allows you to receive reports on total space used by attachments, the types of attachments, and real space wasters like duplicates.

3. Find policy violations

When it comes to attachments, non-work related attachments can also chew up huge amounts of storage. Finding the MP3s and AVIs, and reminding users of the company policy can free up lots of disk space rapidly. While you are at it, using email monitoring will enable you to make sure no one is forwarding all their company email to their personal account, or worse, the competition. Good email management includes safeguarding the company’s assets.

4. Storage

Of course, older emails can take up a ton of storage space, and users won’t delete anything unless you stand next to them and press the keys for them. An email monitoring solution can help you to understand how much better it would be if of all that email was moved to the storage managed by an email archiving solution. Using easy to setup rules, your email management of storage becomes an easy task, as messages are moved to the archive automatically. Your users will have no more run-ins with quotas, and no more need for PST files.

5. Retention

Sometimes, email management means knowing when to say goodbye to those older emails. If your company has a document retention policy, it probably defines not only how long to save certain information, but when it needs to be destroyed. An email archiving solution that offers email monitoring features can automatically age out and purge email that exceeds the defined retention policy, automating the housekeeping that you never have time to get to yourself.

As you can see, the winning combination of email archiving and email monitoring makes email management a much easier task, providing in-depth information about how your users communicate, and supports the company’s document retention and other policies. With these tools you can take your Exchange infrastructure to the next level, providing better service with lower storage costs.

This post was provided by Christina Goggi on behalf of GFI Software Ltd.