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| Huge Spike In Email-Borne Malware – Delayed Reponse From Major Anti-Virus Engines | |
| Posted: Fri Jul 24, 2009 03:11:00 PM | |
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Cyberoam, a division of Elitecore Technologies and the innovator of identity-based Unified Threat Management (UTM) solutions, today announced the Q2 2009 Internet threats trend report, prepared in collaboration with its partner, Commtouch. The highlight of the report was a sharp rise in the number of new viruses being circulated via email which major anti-virus engines were unable to defend against for several hours, leaving networks exposed. One reason for the rise in such malware outbreaks is the appearance of aggressive new variants of several different Trojans for which major anti-virus products took anything between 4 to 80 hours time to detect the malware. In contrast, Cyberoam's Zero Hour Virus Outbreak protection – provided by Commtouch – detected and blocked these malware within the earliest moments of its outbreak, plugging the early-hour vulnerability gap during which millions of users could have been infected. Says Abhilash Sonwane, Vice-President-Product Management, Cyberoam, “Today’s viruses, worms and Trojan downloaders target the biggest weakness in traditional anti-viruses – an inability to release remedial signatures and heuristics within moments of new malware outbreaks. Cyberoam’s combined technique of pro-active zero-hour virus outbreak detection and traditional signature-based Anti-Virus is the recommended defense for such attacks.” Attackers continue to find creative means of bypassing security solutions. In a new phishing trend, they used a unique redirection method that enables them to bypass traditional URL filtering solutions by hiding code between pages hosted on a legitimate education site which they have hijacked. Apart from this, there has been a resurgence in the once-popular image spam messages – this time using new tactics such as foregoing MIME-format standards to bypass traditional spam filters. Intricate scams such as Nigerian 419 schemes are making headlines once again. Spam has slipped through Gmail filters too. Among other threats this quarter, was the use of current events to appeal to recipients’ emotions. Global events including the death of pop superstar, Michael Jackson, and the spread of the swine flu were popular spam subjects. Among Web 2.0 trends, streaming media and downloads are among the top 10 Web site categories infected with malware; they are also two of the most popular categories within the category of user generated content sites. Cyberoam uses the Commtouch RPDTM technology to analyze large volumes of Internet traffic in real-time. Unlike traditional spam filters, it does not rely on email content, so it is able to detect spam in any language and in every message format (including images, HTML, etc.), non-English characters, single and double byte, etc. Its language and content agnostic nature enables it to provide effective spam blocking capabilities. Cyberoam incorporates this technology within its unique identity-based UTM appliances, which deploy user identity-based functionality across all of its features. A departure from traditional IP address-dependent solutions, Cyberoam determines precisely who is doing what in the network, providing IT managers with stronger policy control and clearer visibility of activity. |