Navigating the new threat landscape
Paul Zimski · Computer Fraud & Security · 2011
The threat landscape has evolved. It's no longer just the disgruntled employee or even the opportunistic hacker with which organisations need to be concerned. Highly sophisticated and targeted attacks are on the rise. It all started with the China and Google hacks that saw the use of unprecedented tactics combining encryption and stealth programming to take advantage of an unknown hole in Internet Explorer. Then along came Stuxnet, a Windows worm designed to exploit four zero-day vulnerabilities in order to attack industrial systems in Iran. The threat landscape has evolved. It's no longer just the disgruntled employee or even the opportunistic hacker with which organisations need to be concerned. Highly sophisticated and targeted attacks are on the rise and organisations are having difficulty in preventing classified information assets from walking out of their doors. There is no doubt that the evolution of technology and the increased drive towards mobility has eased the process of information leaking out of organisations, so the onus is on organisations to protect and control access to classified information. Today, they can resist this continued, persistent threat by employing new approaches that bring together key capabilities from application control/whitelisting technology, as well as integrating other capabilities from anti-virus and patch management into a single workflow, explains Paul Zimski of Lumension.