By Cat Yong
One out of two consumers are still unaware about security for their devices, according to Symantec. As more and more categories of devices become connected to the Internet, like wearable computing, smart televisions, various machines and more, Symantec opined that the much touted business and productivity driver, the Internet of Things (IoT), is opening doors to uncharted territory for 2014.
This gives rise to a new phenomenon called the Internet of Vulnerabilities.
Symantec’s other outlook for 2014 is that privacy and security concerns are mounting as targeted attacks escalate. Symantec Malaysia’s Principal Consultant, David Rajoo pointed out, “Organisations are not stopping targeted attacks.”
“Sixty-six percent of breaches went undetected 30 days or more and 2013 actually saw a 42 percent increase in targeted attacks compared to the year before.” Symantec also found that smaller companies tend to be the target of these kind of attacks.
New security tools for 2014
During a briefing with members of the media, David also presented how Symantec is stopping threats today, with its range of security solutions for the endpoint, gateway and data centre.
These solutions are powered by an underlying global intelligence network which is a growing pool of knowledge resources contributed to by Symantec’s over 240 million users and sensors, over 1 billion devices protected by Symantec, 14 operations and response centres, 550 threat researchers and over 7 billion file, URL and IP classifications. All this data goes a long way in developing predictive and proactive protection technologies.
Now, two new tools have been added to Symantec’s protection technologies against targeted attacks. These include Disarm technology found in Symantec’s on-premise Messaging Gateway and the Network Threat Protection in Symantec Endpoint Protection for Mac computers.
David said, “Email is a popular vector for vulnerabilities, and most targeted attacks are sent via email.”
What Symantec’s Disarm technology does is overcome cybercriminals’ oft-used method of burying Zero-Day attacks inside an attachment.
Historically, secure email gateways will not block these attachments because malicious content is difficult to detect, so Symantec’s solution is to remove all active content like Flash, JavaScripts, macros and reconstruct a clean carbon copy of attachments, in real-time. Currently, Disarm only works with Microsoft Office and Adobe PDF files.
“Ninety-eight percent of zero-day exploits in 2013, potentially could have been avoided with Disarm,” said David.
Symantec also started to see the necessity of a Mac version of their Network Threat Protection solution which aims to stop threats before they can implant themselves on the system. According to David, their global intelligence network was starting to discern a huge adoption of Mac computers in the corporate environment.
Mac users’ mentality that they are impervious to cyber attacks makes them perfect targets for cyber criminals.
