Thoreau Would Have Wanted You to Block Access to Facebook

15. November 2010 · Comments Off on Thoreau Would Have Wanted You to Block Access to Facebook · Categories: blog · Tags: , ,

Thoreau Would Have Wanted You to Block Access to Facebook.

John Pescatore harkens back 59 years ago to the first direct dial transcontinental telephone call and 100 years before that when the telegraph was spreading throughout the U.S., comparing that to Facebook.

Same thing going on in security today – next generation firewalls and secure web gateways are way less about blocking and way more about securely enabling connectivity of people and applications – applications like social networking…

Here are Cymbel’s links to next generation firewalls and secure web gateways.

End point security software misses malware, proof that defense-in-depth is a must

25. September 2009 · Comments Off on End point security software misses malware, proof that defense-in-depth is a must · Categories: Malware, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Web 2.0 Network Firewalls, Web Application Firewalls · Tags: , , , , , ,

NSS Labs the well-respected UK-based security product research and testing service, just published the results of its consumer anti-malware test. The most popular products, Symantec and McAfee, both came it at only 82%. Therefore you cannot rely on this single security control to protect you against malware. A layered, defense-in-depth strategy is a must.

While all organizations are different, complementary technologies include Secure Web Gateways, Intrusion Prevention, Data Leak Prevention, or an advanced firewall that performs all of these functions,  and possibly a Security Information and Event Management System. If you are running web applications, you will also need a Web Application Firewall. I wrote about this in my post about the 20 Top Security Controls.

The top vendor was Trend Micro with a 96% success rate when you combine the 91% caught at download time and the 5.5% caught at execution time. I also read about this report in an article at Dark Reading written by Tim Wilson. However, Tim said Trend Micro only blocked 70% of the malware. I am not sure where he got his number.