The Hindu Business Line : `End-point security to gain attention'

Reports of data breaches and compromise of sensitive customer information, specifically in banks and financial houses made headlines. According to the National Association of Software and Service Companies, security concerns have taken away IT business worth about $7-8 billion from India.

Continuing the trend of 2004, applications continued to be the favoured targets, said a report by Ramco Radar. Vulnerabilities that affect Web browsers will be common in 2006. These vulnerabilities allow attackers to bypass traditional security measures like firewalls. Hence, the attacker can circumvent the corporate perimeter security and cause heavy damage.

According to Ramco's Radar, end point security will gain importance in 2006. This is aimed at automatic integration of network access, quarantining and scanning devices before providing access will gain more prominence. Other predictions include the arrival of on-demand anti-virus and vulnerability scanning and patch management. Use of automated technologies on the compliance front will also be observed.

To defend against threats exploiting these issues, users and administrators are advised to apply security updates to all affected software and operating systems. Intrusion detection systems and traffic monitoring software could also reduce exposure to these attacks by blocking access to known malicious Web sites.

Top attacks, according to anti-virus vendor Symantec, included Generic TCP RST Flood Denial of Service attack, the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Resolution Service Stack Overflow and Possible Incoming Malicious Attachment.

The top three categories of spam are commercial products, financial products/services and Internet offers. According to Symantec Probe Network, North America continues to be the most prominent region of origin for spam (50 per cent).