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Fighting Cybercriminals United
By Anoop K Menon
Did you know that cybercrime-ware is available on the Internet as a managed service at ridiculously low prices? Extending the outsourcing philosophy, cyber criminals can now specialize on the most profitable activities while outsourcing tedious data collection/aggregation chores to other organizations. Not the most beneficial example of the outsourcing wave! But on a more serious note, this represents only the tip of the threat iceberg that enterprises must defend against in the coming years.
Recently, I spoke to a security analyst and he painted a scary picture of managed threat environments comprising large-scale Botnets, multi-tiered identity fraud exchanges, zero-day exploit services and the like. According to him, intellectually driven hacking or pranks are history; organized crime syndicates that thrive on tightly integrated identity frauds, Botnets and socially engineered phishing attacks are in.
As cyber criminals continue to proliferate and innovate, what should enterprises be looking at to secure themselves? An interesting trend is one where point products are turning into features in integrated security solutions/suites, both at the endpoints and at the network edge. With an integrated suite, you get consolidated and centralized administration, policy and reporting capabilities. As customers incorporate security into every facet of IT environments, this evolution will dissolve partitions between technologies, organizations and management practices.
Enterprises should take a step back and take stock of the issues they can afford to compromise on and those they can’t. Simultaneously there is also the challenge of sticking to the basics, namely business objectives.
Security issues arise when there is a disconnect between the goals of the business and the needs of the people inside the organization who are actually trying to achieve those goals. In my observation, in such a scenario, enterprises tend to introduce common policy measures that stop people from using applications which they ought to be using for collaboration, managing workflow, and so on. Or in the worst-case scenario, allow people to use things they actually shouldn’t be, compromising confidential data in the bargain. The challenge is to get the alignment right.
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