And so it begins...
Symantec bought out MessageLabs and is (in their own words) "combining MessageLabs’ deep expertise in the SaaS market with Symantec’s rich portfolio of technologies".
The interesting thing is that Symantec does not really lead in the anti-virus market (in terms of quality, not market share. All antivirus products are about the same) or antispam (MessageLabs is excellent here).
So, what could they possibly bring to the party that MessageLabs doesn't already have?
DLP.
MessageLabs has DLP but it is very simple and not really worth very much. The framework is certainly there though. Add some good DLP and voila - you have a product that is worth something.
Showing posts with label symantec. Show all posts
Showing posts with label symantec. Show all posts
Friday, October 10, 2008
Thursday, July 17, 2008
The Perfect Storm
Its time to get your raincoats and lifeboats - the perfect storm is finished brewing - it is about to rain down upon us.
This may sound dramatic but I think that I may not be conveying the amount of pain that Information Security is about to receive. We will certainly have to step up our game.
Symantec and Verizon have done some interesting research into the underground hacker community and their findings are rather interesting. A bit scary too.
There is an entire community of totally different players that all work together to get from the point where a nerdy kid finds a vulnerability to where a hacker uses that to get into a PC, steal personal information and credit card details, sell them or use them and move on.
So far, it seems, that the community has been quite lazy and have just discarded company information to get to the credit card information and personal information (ID numbers, social security numbers, addresses etc).
This has provided us in Information Security with a perfect opportunity. We have been able to observe how hackers work while they have been taking information that is not our own. Companies that have credit card information have been the ones that were most under attack but those that don't handle credit card information have largely been ignored by hackers except for some members of staff who have been caught out but then they have only lost their own personal information.
There just really isn't a (black/underground) market for information that is not credit card or personal finance related.
However, it was always my feeling that the credit card/personal finance market would become saturated at some stage and the loosely-bound-but-still-very-organised-and-co-ordinated underground market would start to look elsewhere.
Essentially, the infrastructure is there for wide-scale information theft but the will wasn't there. I have thought this for a while my question was always - when will the will be there? When will Jack-the-hacker decide that credit card theft is no longer worth his time and start to deal in company information ?
Adrian Lane from Securosis thinks that the falling prices in the underground economy is humorous. I disagree. I look at it as very scary and the final puzzle-piece.
I think that the perfect storm is about to be unleashed.
This may sound dramatic but I think that I may not be conveying the amount of pain that Information Security is about to receive. We will certainly have to step up our game.
Symantec and Verizon have done some interesting research into the underground hacker community and their findings are rather interesting. A bit scary too.
There is an entire community of totally different players that all work together to get from the point where a nerdy kid finds a vulnerability to where a hacker uses that to get into a PC, steal personal information and credit card details, sell them or use them and move on.
So far, it seems, that the community has been quite lazy and have just discarded company information to get to the credit card information and personal information (ID numbers, social security numbers, addresses etc).
This has provided us in Information Security with a perfect opportunity. We have been able to observe how hackers work while they have been taking information that is not our own. Companies that have credit card information have been the ones that were most under attack but those that don't handle credit card information have largely been ignored by hackers except for some members of staff who have been caught out but then they have only lost their own personal information.
There just really isn't a (black/underground) market for information that is not credit card or personal finance related.
However, it was always my feeling that the credit card/personal finance market would become saturated at some stage and the loosely-bound-but-still-very-organised-and-co-ordinated underground market would start to look elsewhere.
Essentially, the infrastructure is there for wide-scale information theft but the will wasn't there. I have thought this for a while my question was always - when will the will be there? When will Jack-the-hacker decide that credit card theft is no longer worth his time and start to deal in company information ?
Adrian Lane from Securosis thinks that the falling prices in the underground economy is humorous. I disagree. I look at it as very scary and the final puzzle-piece.
I think that the perfect storm is about to be unleashed.
Friday, October 5, 2007
Symantec - "We don't (just) sell anti-virus".
I went to a Symantec presentation today to learn about their new End Point Protection and to take a sip of their Kool-Aid.
They took great pains to make sure that the audience was aware that they do not sell anti-virus software anymore - they sell "end point protection". Which, really, is anti-virus with other stuff.
The point is that even according to Symantec's reports viruses are dying out. (By virus I mean a program that self replicates - not a trojan, spyware, rootkit or worm). Trojans and worms and rootkits are becoming easier to modify and deploy and signature lists (against which these uglies are compared and blocked) are becoming too slow.
The moral of the story - viruses are (pretty much) dead... they have been replaced with new threats. Symantec painted a picture of their protection product as the silver bullet that will protect a PC against all the new threats. It looks good but I'm not 100% sold. I'd recommend the product but I'd back it up with a lot of other Information Security goodies.
They took great pains to make sure that the audience was aware that they do not sell anti-virus software anymore - they sell "end point protection". Which, really, is anti-virus with other stuff.
The point is that even according to Symantec's reports viruses are dying out. (By virus I mean a program that self replicates - not a trojan, spyware, rootkit or worm). Trojans and worms and rootkits are becoming easier to modify and deploy and signature lists (against which these uglies are compared and blocked) are becoming too slow.
The moral of the story - viruses are (pretty much) dead... they have been replaced with new threats. Symantec painted a picture of their protection product as the silver bullet that will protect a PC against all the new threats. It looks good but I'm not 100% sold. I'd recommend the product but I'd back it up with a lot of other Information Security goodies.
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