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In Today's Web 2.0 Environment, Proactive Security Is Paramount. Are You Protected?
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Introductory Overview: Boundaries No Longer Physical, but Virtual
The Internet today is a different mechanism than it once was. Widely referred to as "Web 2.0," today's Internet is a place where the boundaries of the enterprise are no longer clear and this has had a ripple effect on network security.
Applications are now enabled over the Internet and the use of corporate intranets and extranets are now critical www.securecomputing.com components of business. Indeed, organizations now build their businesses on Web infrastructures, and we've even seen the proliferation of completely "virtual" companies that have no physical headquarters at all. Today's business model includes inbound access for remote employees, partners, and customers. Internal employees also reach beyond the edge of the internal network to communicate and gather information across the Internet.
This bi-directional aspect of IP-based application access creates significant security challenges for enterprises, however. Communication methods are both inbound and outbound, and so too, threats have also become both inbound and outbound in nature.
The enterprise must be protected from malware (malicious software), regulatory compliance must be ensured, data leakage prevented, and employee productivity must be managed. These security issues exist for all IP-based traffic, whether email, VoIP, instant messaging, Web access, file transfers, or other enterprise applications communicating over IP.
In short, business use of the Web and Web 2.0 applications expose organizations to both inbound and outbound security threats which transcend the legacy security measures for Web 1.0. The new generation of emerging security threats now consists of malicious attacks led by cyber criminals targeted at specific organizations for personal or financial gain. This paper outlines these new threats and discusses the limited effectiveness of legacy Web security solutions against those threats. The paper then outlines the new proactive security paradigm that is necessary for securing Web 2.0 applications and protecting the enterprises that use them on a daily basis. Let's begin by outlining today's Web 2.0 threats.
Inbound Security Threats
As noted above, gone are the days when the primary cause for concern was a broad-based Internet virus attack. Those attacks were launched to gain notoriety with the hacker's peers. Web sites were defaced much like graffiti is posted on a public wall or highway overpass, and political or personal messages were sometimes embedded in Web pages or disseminated to desktops. These attacks were a nuisance, required clean-up, and were often designed to embarrass the recipient. These broad-based attacks often caused a drain on productivity, sapped bandwidth, and created potential liability problems. The attackers however, were often unsophisticated with the virtual equivalent of a spray can. Today's attackers, on the other hand, are sophisticated and organized, and financially motivated. They are cyber-criminals who use technology to commit targeted attacks against specific persons or organizations for profit. The security risk, and potential for substantial loss, is much greater.
One tactic used by these cyber-criminals is to leverage their sophisticated knowledge to plant worms on host machines. These compromised machines, known as zombies, are rented out to carry out phishing, spam or other attacks1. In addition to for-hire zombie networks ("botnets") cyber-criminals also use sophisticated tools to deploy seemingly innocent content which actually contains Trojan horses with malicious functions. These targeted Trojan horses present a threat to the organization in that on the surface, they appear harmless and innocuous, and may even take the form of a useful application or an entertaining game. Often these attacks utilize commonly used productivity tools like MS Office files transmitted via work email or via personal email that employees access via encrypted Web mail. Once opened by the recipient, the Trojan is released, opening the door for corporate data espionage, data theft, and the release of additional malware.
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