Closing the gate
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Today organisations everywhere are living with the mixed blessing of open yet inherently insecure messaging systems.
When the first emails were sent over the ARPAnet - the forefather of the Internet - they were intended for a limited, trusted audience of academics and researchers. Convenience of communication to them outweighed security considerations. Today organisations everywhere are living with the mixed blessing of that open yet inherently insecure messaging system.
Exploiting that, legions of hackers and malware authors intent on crippling corporate networks or stealing valuable data have developed ingenious email-based attacks - from viruses and spyware to phishing and Trojan horses. Each of these has historically given rise to point technologies and services: anti-virus tools, spam blockers, content filters and scores of others.
But this is an expensive and unsatisfactory situation, says Craig Brennan, CEO of messaging security software vendor Tumbleweed. "Securing email cannot just be about looking at [the content of] inbound or outbound messages or spam or viruses separately. It is about all of these things together."
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Financial services company Irish Life and Permanent, for example, recently installed an email firewall from Tumbleweed to combat spam, virus, hacker and phishing attacks. This, it says, has lowered its exposure to email-bound threats, and freed up hardware capacity by preventing so-called 'dark traffic' from entering the network.
Even leakage of sensitive information can be guarded against with gateway software or appliances which apply policies that block outbound emails containing certain keywords or attachments.
Appliance designed to protect against a range of threats are proving increasingly popular. According to market watcher IDC, spend on security appliances will rise at a compound annual growth rate of 54% over the next four years.
While such devices may filter out spam and viruses with some success, the more recent phishing attacks - where official documentation is faked to fool users into parting with credit card, bank account or other sensitive information - are harder to guard against. Some vendors have risen to that challenge by offering safeguards beyond simply analysing message content for signs of phishing.
"We can track down phishing scammers based on tell-tale signs, such as people buying up large, unrelated email lists," explains Pieter Kasselman, senior researcher for security software and service company CyberTrust. Once identified, the servers of these scammers can be blacklisted by mail servers.
But each step taken to prevent attacks has to date encouraged the perpetrators to refine their techniques. Among the most recent examples is 'spear phishing', where attacks target individual companies with messages: a bogus systems administrators may ask users to confirm their passwords or download a software update that turns out to be spyware.
IBM's Global Security Index for August 2005 found that 66% of attacks were aimed at specific businesses; and the UK's National Criminal Intelligence Service reckons 80% of enterprises have been targeted in such a way. Given that, organisations can assume they will be shooting at a moving target for years to come.
