India’s IT threat landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years. While yesterday’s attacks were meant simply to make headlines, today’s attacks have become more sophisticated and stealthy, targeting specific organizations to reap financial gain.
Although antivirus, antispyware and other signature-based protection measures were sufficient to protect organizations in the past, small businesses now need proactive endpoint security measures that can protect against zero-day attacks and even unknown threats.
They also need to take a structured approach to endpoint security, implementing a comprehensive solution that not only protects from threats on all levels but also provides interoperability, seamless implementation and centralized management.
Value of information
According to Vishal Dhupar, MD, Symantec India: “Today for enterprises across the world, and that includes India, information has quickly become the most valuable asset. Unfortunately, it has also become the most vulnerable asset.”
According to an industry reference, in India, IPR and business information leakage contributes 32 per cent and 68 per cent respectively. This is a clear indication that data loss threats are eminent for Indian enterprises.
Also it is worth noting that India is a major outsourcing hub for the world. It means that some of the most sensitive information of the IT, healthcare, insurance and manufacturing segments from across the world resides with Indian enterprises. Against this backdrop, data loss prevention has acquired a huge prominence due the credibility, compliance and competition factors.
Dhupar feels that given these dynamics it is not surprising that security strategies have evolved within organizations to become more strategic, more expansive and more complex.
Security is no longer just an IT function, but touches every part of the business – from the CEO and board members responsible for a company’s reputation; to HR, finance and legal that need to manage compliance; to business leaders that drive performance. According to Dhupar, Symantec foresees the following trends for the 2009:
Explosion of malware variants
Recent attacks include new strains of malware which consist of millions of distinct threats that propagate as a single, core piece of malware. This creates an unlimited number of unique malware instances.
The sensor data obtained via the Symantec Global Intelligence Network also shows we have reached an inflection point. There are now more malicious programs created than legitimate programs. These new and emerging threats have given rise to the need for new, complementary detection methods such as reputation-based security approaches.
Advanced web threats
As the number of available web services increases and as browsers continue to converge on a uniform interpretation standard for scripting languages, Symantec expects the number of new web-based threats to continue to increase.
Economic crisis
The global economic crisis will be the basis of many new attacks. This will include phishing attacks (eg, whose fictitious premise might surround the closing of a given bank).
Similarly, attacks may also exploit other types of fraudulent activity around the economic issues including e-mails that promise the ability to easily get a mortgage or refinance.
Expect to see an increase in scams that prey on people who have had homes foreclosed, an increase in work from home scams targeting the unemployed, and an increase in spam that mimics job sites.
Social networks
In 2008, Symantec has noticed an uptake in activity in threats related to social networking sites. These threats have involved phishing for username accounts and/or using social context as a way to increase the “success rate” of an online threat.
Spammers in select EMEA regions have been heavily promoting social networking sites; one instance reached more than two million Symantec customers. These threats will become increasingly important for enterprise IT organizations since the new entering workforce often accesses these tools using corporate resources.
Spam levels will rise
Symantec saw a 65 per cent drop in spam between the 24 hours prior to the McColo shutdown and 24 hours after. We expect to see spam levels rise back to approximately 75 to 80 per cent.
Command-and-control systems will be re-established and more importantly, this event may drive spammers toward the continued use of peer-to-peer botnets, which are generally more resilient.
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.
Virtual machine security
Virtualization technology will be incorporated into security solutions to provide an environment isolated and protected from the chaos of a general purpose operating system environment.
This technology will provide a safe environment for sensitive transactions such as banking and protect critical infrastructure such as the security components that protect the general purpose operating environment.
Protection for the Indian user
Dhupar believes that Symantec’s mission is to enable customers to have confidence in their connected experiences – infrastructure, information and interactions.
“Security is a topic that is always top of mind for businesses and is no longer an issue that lends itself to one-size-fits all solutions,” he said.
“Finding smart, cost-effective ways to ensure that corporate data is kept secure, and applications designed to do business with partners and customers are effective, private and safe are key to many company’s success. As such, companies often turn to specialist security partners for assistance to find the right way to address issues”.
Dhupar said that Symantec constantly strives to address the security market through new age offerings. Take for example Symantec’s Endpoint Protection 11.0 which contains proactive technologies that protect customers from both today’s threats and tomorrow’s emerging threats.
He claims it “resets the bar” for endpoint security, reducing overhead, time and costs so that customers can efficiently manage security and gain confidence that their corporate assets and business are protected.
This solution reduces administrative costs associated with managing multiple endpoint security products and makes it easier for businesses to adopt a more effective multi-layered security solution and extends the power of antivirus to address today’s evolving threat landscape, Dhupar said.
In addition, the most advanced DLP offerings are available as integrated solutions that combine both endpoint and network-based software to protect confidential data wherever it is stored or used.
These solutions leverage a common foundation with the same policy management, detection, incident response workflow, and reporting capabilities across network, storage, and endpoint systems, said Dhupar.
This unified approach to enforcement enables the organization to write a policy once and automatically enforce it throughout the enterprise. In this regard, Symantec recently announced Symantec Data Loss Prevention, version 9.0, providing organizations with increased ability to discover, monitor and protect confidential information wherever it is stored or used.
Symantec provides companies with comprehensive data loss prevention (DLP) coverage across endpoint, network and storage systems through a single, unified interface to protect structured and unstructured data.
In addition, Symantec’s Control Compliance Suite (CCS) 9.0 is a group of integrated products that helps users reduce the cost of managing compliance through process automation.
CCS provides a comprehensive view of risk and compliance posture with a combination of point-in-time controls assessment and real-time monitoring of risks and threats and offers an end-to-end coverage of the IT compliance lifecycle.
“For Symantec, the number one priority is to focus on the top end of the pyramid, with a lot of touch points from Symantec to basically endorse the value proposition that we bring on the table,” Dhupar said.
“This is Symantec’s current strategy and will continue to be its strategy for sometime. Its second strategy is to evolve newer and newer mechanisms of selling, have more channels and different motives of selling those to these markets like SaaS and cloud computing and technologies like that.”
Dhupar is of the opinion that for an organisation’s long-term success it is important to ensure customer loyalty by providing innovative next generation technologies, architectures and standards, while providing operational direction to R&D and engineering services.
Maintaining this balance is the real challenge that R&D organisations, CTOs and CIOs are facing. At Symantec’s R&D centres, it constantly endeavours to focus on upcoming technologies and continuously innovate, keeping in mind increased benefits for enterprises and end users
HDFC, Wipro, TVS Motors and ICICI are amongst some of the Symantec’s customers in India.