£12 Billion… Free!

By Guy Bunker | May 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment 

Guy Bunker

Well, that’s if you use file sharing and the content is less than legal. A report has estimated that around 7m people are involved in illegal downloads and that over the course of a year, on one particular file sharing service the value of the goods available was around £12BN. Which is a lot of stuff…

Two thoughts come to mind. Firstly, we have seen that a lot of malware is currently distributed via illegal downloads, I’ve written about this before. Secondly, what if it’s your Intellectual Property that’s being made available? This could damage your reputation and results! While this is primarily aimed at electronic IP, eg films, music, games, software applications, the business of counterfeiting and selling counterfeit goods is very strong on the underground economy. There are companies who will watch for your property on underground servers – it might be worth investigating.

Guy Bunker

When was the last time you did a backup?

By admin | May 28, 2009 | 1 Comment 

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When was the last time you backed up your laptop? Do you know? It’s probably pretty embarrassing when you stop and realise all those things you’ve created could just go walkabout at any time.

Statistically there is a laptop left in every single taxi every month in the major cities of the world … every month, that’s 4,350,000 + missing laptops this year worldwide. It makes you wonder where they’ll end up? Even more worrying you are 22 times more likely to lose your phone than laptop – which makes, err – you work it out – a lot of phones and PDAs going walkies too!.

Although around 70% of the digital universe will be generated by individuals, not businesses … guess who’ll be looking after it? You guessed it; business and Public sector organisations have responsibility for the security, privacy, reliability, storage and compliance of all digital assets … including personal stuff.

And you’re telling me you haven’t backed up your laptop data for how long?

In the consumer world 1/3 of everyone has never bothered to back up anything and only 1 in 4 bother to do a backup regularly. Not only should we be protecting data from leaking (there’s a particularly good book on this “Data Leaks for Dummies” available at all good Amazon stores) out of our organisation and getting into the wrong hands, but we should be backing up our data to ensure we have a good chance of keeping our business running should a laptop get left on a train (as if … ?).

40% of us have lost data at some point … and that statistic is growing. Worldwide consumers and businesses are going to create more digital information this year than in the previous 5,000 years. By the way represents three million times the information in all the books ever written (and currently we are publishing around 3,000 books worldwide – daily). That could also be represented by a stack of books from outside my back door to the Sun and back – 6 times, that’s 93 million miles x 12 =1152 million miles for those who can’t be bothered to work it out, that’s an awful amount of stuff.

So this year your average CIO is focused on delivering business growth, cutting costs, managing complexity. But they are also being relied upon to ensure continuity of business processes (without hiccups).

Information remains our competitive edge, the answer to all our “recession-get-out-prayers. But the growth of information is putting a considerable strain on the IT infrastructures, so we must take steps to make sure we create secure, reliable, scalable and highly available information management infrastructures to handle the increased amounts of information that is needed to be storage and managed in the future.

So back the blooming stuff up!

Gareth Fraser-King

90% of email is spam

By admin | May 28, 2009 | Leave a Comment 

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So the brief ‘holiday’ from ‘spam is officially over according to our colleagues at MessageLabs and their latest Intelligence Report.

For a time after the shutdown of the McColo network we saw a significant drop in worldwide spam levels – a 65% drop in the first the 24 hours alone! But as we said at the time, Symantec expected spam levels to increase over time as spammers find new ways to deliver their emails. And sadly it appears we were right.

I guess this was inevitable. It seems command-and-control systems have been re-established and maybe more spammers are moving toward the use of peer-to-peer botnets, which are generally more resilient.

Also it is a sad fact that in this turbulent economic climate there may be other hosting companies around the world who might be willing to facilitate this sort of spam activity. Spammers, like other members of the cyber-economy, have a sophisticated business model and distrubution network and will find ways to pick up the slack.

Spamming is a business, so while the McColo shutdown definitely helped to disrupt the spam supply chain, only long term action to increase the effective costs to spammers will effect a long term drop in overall spam levels. Technologies such as spam traffic shaping and adaptive connection management, increase the economic costs for spammers by ensuring more spam stays on the spammers servers vs. being accepted by the receiving mail systems.

Dominic Cook

Green in the recession

By admin | May 27, 2009 | 1 Comment 

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So the recession, it would seem, has not impacted the IT community’s will to develop and invest in Green IT solutions. Global research, out today from Symantec, has shown that while companies around the world are keeping a close eye on their wallets, IT executives are happier than ever before to spend on Green IT initiatives, with over sixty-eight percent of UK executives expecting to see an increase in green IT budgets over the next 12 months.

This optimistic outlook for future investment is being driven by the ability of new IT products to impact energy efficiency and therefore fit within companywide sustainability initiatives, leaving the realms of the IT department and delivering value back to the business as a whole. IT departments are even willing to pay a premium for energy efficient products. Symantec’s 2009 Green IT survey showed that fifty-seven percent of those questioned would pay at least 10 percent more for energy efficient products, while 40 percent are willing to pay at least 20 percent more.

Over the past 12 months, IT has emerged as a new driving force in implementing green initiatives – not only for energy savings benefits, but also as a result of widespread desire to implement environmentally responsible practices. The pendulum has swung both ways and IT is now taking a balanced approach that is more integral to an organisation’s ‘green’ strategy, proven by the fact that the vast majority of respondents are now responsible for the energy costs of their data center.

Check out the findings,

Andrew Harrison

Are Social Media sites the new Security Achilles Heel?

By admin | May 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment 

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Reports today that the Cyber Security Knowledge Transfer Network (CSKTN) – a UK Government think-tank on internet security – has highlighted that the UK needs to start thinking about how to secure social networking sites and virtual worlds, fits with what we found recently at the InfoSec Show in London.

At the show we did a quick survey of the hundreds of experts attending the UK’s premier security event and we found that while attendees were, as you might expect, conscious of ‘traditional’ routes for cyber attack, over a quarter of those questioned said they had never modified their social media site privacy settings so that only certain individuals can see their personal details. Essentially enabling hundreds of millions of people to access their social network page and obtain their personal information. And if the security industry itself isn’t doing it, what chance for the wider business community and general public?

Yet today social media tools are becoming all pervasive. Indeed many businesses are actively using social media to market and talk with their customers. I bet a visit to any office in the UK today would reveal people all around using networking sites, Twitter and a myriad of other social media sites and services.

So it is about time we started to look more closely at our security policies to ensure they do not become the Achilles heel of an organization and that people can continue to enjoy the considerable benefits and enjoyment of using social media sites, without putting their businesses or their personal data at risk.

John Turner
VP EMEA Presales

As usual spammers show no morals

By admin | May 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment 

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When you watch the internet security landscape few tactics that the ‘bad-guys’ use really surprise you. Spammers and those Phishing for our personal details always use whatever hook they can think of to snare the unsuspecting and unwary. Often they use world news, major sporting events or even disasters to try and trap us.

So I am not surprised to see that now spammers are now spreading their wares using the backdrop of the latest figures from the World Health Organization (WHO) that say that there are at least 170 million diabetic patients worldwide, and that number will double by the year 2030.

My colleague Mayur Kulkarni from the Symantec Security Response team reports that spammers are replicating diabetes offers from genuine medical suppliers to snare the unwary into giving over their personal details such as name, email address, and phone number. Spammers are a crafty lot, they use the real medical supplier’s details, their fake website is made to look and feel like the real thing, and they even ensure the genuine supplier name appears either in the subject line or sender field of the message.

Once again the rule of the game is to always type legitimate URLs directly into the browser address bar when ordering supplies – otherwise not only do you risk receiving fake and potentially dangerous products from an unscrupulous operator, but you might also find your personal details have been harvested.

For more ways to avoid Phishing attacks check out this simple video.

Dominic Cook

Wider authorship, wider content

By admin | May 26, 2009 | 4 Comments 

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It is just about a year since View from the Bunker was first launched and in that time its readership has continued to grow month by month.

Just recently it rated as the 29th most influential security blog in the world according to analysts Social Media Network and of course it won Computer Weekly’s IT Security blog of the year.

When we established the blog it was always an intention to have regular contributors from a number of Symantec security experts and over time there have already been a number. But one person, Dr Guy Bunker, has dominated the blog and contributed greatly to the growth in readership and interest, for which we are very grateful.

But we’ve decided to go back to our original plan and continue to feature a wider authorship to the site. So in the coming months you will see new names and contributors to the site, other than Guy. As a result we are confident you will find the blog as insightful, informative and entertaining as ever.

Dominic Cook

Back From Prague…

By Guy Bunker | May 22, 2009 | 2 Comments 

Guy Bunker

I was at the Cloud Computing Conference in Prague earlier this week and there were a lot of great sessions – along with some very interesting new perspectives. Stephen Foskett has done a great report and rather than repeat that, here are my main discussion points.

1) Is the lack of ‘true’ European cloud providers preventing adoption of the cloud in Europe? It’s an interesting question and one I had never thought about. Having worked for American companies for nearly two decades, I have never been concerned by the control they may have. It is true that various EU countries have very strict privacy laws and so they may be restricted from using global public clouds – but for the rest… this is something that needs to be looked at further. The cloud is going to offer competitive advantage to those that use it effectively – the EU mustn’t be left behind.

2) Cloud capacity. Cloud service providers often tout ‘infinite’ capacity – but in reality they do have physical machines (virtualized up to the hilt) which have limitations. When looking to deploy to a cloud, the customer should be able to see what the capacity of the service provider is, what it is currently running at and what the peak demand was. For customers requiring a single instance it is slightly different from those who want elastic demand and who may be caught short. After all, when it’s gone, it’s gone – and adding more capacity to a data centre, cloudy or not, will take time…

3) Computational integrity. This came up at the FORWARDmeeting as well – in essence how do you know that the calculations going on in the cloud are correct. What would happen if someone interfered with the data or the calculation – would you be able to spot it. As a simple example, what if someone changed one digit in every telephone number in your CRM data, or map data was shifted by half a kilometre? This is a theoretical problem at this point, but it is a potential weakness that needs to be addressed. Encrypting data and hashing it means you can check on the data integrity – the data is how you left it, but how about the calculations? Curiously, I discussed this in the Data Leaks book – and one approach is to use well known data / transactions for which the outcome is known and then to periodically throw this at the service and check the result is what was expected. If not… well, there’s another piece of your disaster recovery / business continuity strategy you need to cover.

Here is a picture of the expert panel, including your’s truly, Guy Bunker. For more pictures take a look here.

gb-prague2

Once It’s Out There…

By Guy Bunker | May 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment 

Guy Bunker

… You can never get it back. I have written before on the fact that the Internet never forgets, but it is back in the news again this week – and people really shouldn’t be surprised.

Now ‘deleted‘ Tweets are easy to find, and deleted pictures can be foundon social network sites. Systems are becoming more complex and as a way to improve availability, data is copied around, with copies held in different locations. All good news if you want to keep stuff safe – but very tough when you want to delete it. A lot of systems don’t track where all the copies are, so when you delete one, the others remain, in other cases, the link (URL) is removed but the data remains, so if you know the name then you can still find the image. Furthermore, if systems are backed up, then the data will still be in the backup – and could be restored at a later date, and finally, search engines also cache web pages, so you could find the data there as well.

All-in-all, if the data is out on the Internet, then it is no longer private and it is impossible to delete. This might cause a few wry smiles but the issue is the same for those businesses looking at cloud computing. What happens when you move from one service provider to another, is there a guarantee that the data has been properly removed and all copies destroyed from the original provider? Data Loss Prevention (DLP) technologies can be deployed to monitor for data leaks and prevent them from happening, but that is not the usual case. Something to ask your service provider… “Can you prove that my data has been properly managed and deleted?”, “Would you know if my data had been leaked from your service?”

Conficker Continues To Spread

By admin | May 20, 2009 | 18 Comments 

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The spread of Conficker/Downadup since February

The spread of Conficker/Downadup since February

Well much of the media hype seems to have died down around Conficker/Downadup, but it is still out there spreading far and wide. In fact the Symantec threat intelligence team estimate 50,000 PCs a day right are attacked. However just to clarify, this isn’t necessarily a cumulative total because it doesn’t take into account machines which don’t get cleaned up and get repeatedly infected.

This is a heat map of the spread of Conficker since February and as you can see the US, Brazil and India top the charts.

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