 "India Dominates Global Spam Scene: Report")
IBM has released the results of its X-Force 2012 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report, which shows a sharp increase in browser-related exploits, renewed concerns around social media password security, and continued challenges in mobile devices and corporate “bring your own device” (BYOD) programs.
India has shown nearly continuous growth (with one major decline in the first quarter of 2012) and now dominates the scene by a large margin, sending out nearly 16 percent of all spam. This might be the result of a 25 percent growth in Indian Internet users over the past 12 months. It is the first time that a country accounts for about 16 percent of all spam. The previous record holder was the United States, which accounted for 15 percent in 2007.
Data for the bi-annual X-Force report comes from IBM’s security operations centres which monitor more than 15 billion security events a day on behalf of approximately 4,000 clients in more than 130 countries.
“Today’s security risks are fundamentally different; businesses have to be proactive about security, anticipating the kinds of risks that expanding the business or opening up operations to more clients and partners will create,” said Vaidyanathan Iyer, Country Manager for Security, Software Group, IBM ISA. “As clients strive to expand globally, achieve compliance and meet other information technology goals without adding resources, the IBM infrastructure, experience and expertise, coupled with the ability to manage multiple products from various security vendors, can help maximise existing security investments.”
Emerging Trends In Mobile Security
While there are reports of exotic mobile malware, most smartphone users are still most at risk of premium SMS (short message service, or texting) scams. These scams work by sending SMS messages to premium phone numbers in a variety of different countries automatically from installed applications. There are multiple scam infection approaches for this:
An application that looks legitimate in an app store but only has malicious intent
An application that is a clone of a real application with a different name and some malicious code
A real application that has been wrapped by malicious code and typically presented in an alternative app store
One game-changing transformation is the pervasiveness of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs. Many companies are still in their infancy in adapting policies for allowing employees to connect their personal laptops or smartphones to the company network. To make BYOD work within a company, a thorough and clear policy should be in place before the first employee-owned device is added to the company’s infrastructure.
What Is A Secure Password?
The connection between websites, cloud-based services, and webmail provides a seamless experience from device to device, but users should be cautious about how these accounts are connected, the security of their password, and what private data has been provided for password recovery or account resetting. X-Force recommends the use of a lengthy password comprised of multiple words instead of an awkward combination of characters, numbers and symbols.
On the server-side, X-Force recommends encrypting passwords to the database using a hash function that is suitable for password storage. The hash function should be difficult to calculate, which helps limit the effectiveness of attacks.
Improvements In Internet Security Continue
As discussed in the 2011 IBM X-Force Trend and Risk Report, there continues to be progress in certain areas of Internet security. IBM X-Force data reports a continuing decline in exploit releases, improvements from the top ten vendors on patching vulnerabilities and a significant decrease in the area of portable document format (PDF) vulnerabilities. IBM believes that this area of improvement is directly related to the new technology of sandboxing provided by the AdobeY Reader X release.
Sandboxing technology works by isolating an application from the rest of the system, so that if compromised, the attacker code running within the application is limited to what it can do or what it can access. Sandboxes are proving to be a successful investment from a security perspective. In the X-Force report, there was a significant drop in Adobe PDF vulnerability disclosures during the first half of 2012. This development coincides nicely with the adoption of AdobeY Reader X, the first version of Acrobat Reader released with sandboxing technology.