Optimal Security : the Lumension Blog

We recently sat down with John Dunn, editor of Techworld, to discuss how whitelisting has evolved over the years and where the endpoint security market is heading in 2010.

Q: You were writing about whitelisting seven years ago, how close do you think whitelisting is to becoming a mainstream security technology?
A: It won’t happen quickly beyond [...]

There’s been a lot of talk about what role whitelisting will play in the endpoint protection suites of the future.  Opinions dissent about what it will take for whitelisting to become easily implementable for users and whether it will replace or augment the traditional anti-virus approach.  Whatever the opinion, I think most folks can agree [...]

There was early speculation this morning that the Twitter outage was yet another case of growing pains with the Twitter infrastructure simply not being able to keep up with the load associated with their rapid growth. However, today’s outage is happening at the same time a new version of the Koobface malware was found in [...]

Willie Sutton is reputed to have said (although he didn’t, actually), when asked why he robbed banks, “Because that’s where the money is.” So, we’re not really surprised to learn that a new scam is on to liberate the contents of ATMs, and by more sophisticated means than the skimmers I’ve written about previously. Nope, [...]

I came across yet another copy of a malicious PDF file being hosted on the Internet. The PDF file highlights the arms race currently being fought by signature based anti-virus vendors and the bad guys. Simply put, by obfuscating the underlying malware, the bad guys can easily slip malicious PDF files through signature-based AV solutions [...]

McAfee, one of the largest AV vendors in the security space, recently acquired Solidcore Systems, a company that sells dynamic whitelisting technology, in a $47 million dollar deal that would add whitelisting capabilities to McAfee’s current product portfolio. While this comes as no surprise, this move by McAfee is just the tipping point for the [...]

While Microsoft may believe that its Internet Information Services 6 Web-server software issues are only limited to a data leakage issue and not necessarily a larger immediate threat, Microsoft should consider other aspects of this issue and accelerate a solution to protect the community at large.
The Bigger Picture
At first glance, the issue with IIS 6 [...]

Like most readers, I’ve been using computers for a long time. For me it started with the PLATO project at the University of Illinois (Go Illini!!), with its cool touch panels. Then punch cards on mainframes. Then micros, minis … and finally the DOS-based PC. [Remember the dual-floppy drive 5150?] Yup, those were the days [...]

So here you are, an accomplished network administrator… you understand the risks to your enterprise.  You have managed to wrestle local administrator rights away from your user community.  All systems are running current versions of a popular antivirus software.  So your user community can browse the Internet with gleeful abandon.  Think again.  Joe User while [...]

Risk exposure- Adobe JBig2 Issue
The original Adobe JBig2 exploit code was rumored to have been sold as a Zero-day exploit on or around January 1st for $75,000 or more. Beginning on or around January 11th, the exploit was actively used on the public Internet. On February 19th, ShadowServer posted information on the vulnerability and it [...]