Fighting malware and spam

Smarter ways to fight smarter threats

Conrad HerrmannZone Labs

  Corporate stream: Friday 26 Sept 2003, 09.40-10.20.

Smarter ways to fight smarter threats

Code Red, Nimda, Bugbear, SQL Slammer... These threats wreaked havoc on the Internet over the past two years. With each new attack, anti-virus companies race to issue updates while software vendors desperately patch vulnerabilities. Yet often, countless systems are infected by the time a patch is available.

The economic implications of these threats are profound: a March 2003 ICSA Labs study found that 11.3 per cent of computers were hit by viruses every month in 2002, with the average cost of mending each system rising over 117 percent from the previous year. Given the enormous security and financial stakes and the unavoidable lag time between patch updates, enterprises must halt the propagation of these types of threats before they consume the network.

The answers lie in endpoint security policies that can suppress virus replication by preventing inbound infection as well as prevent an infected host from spreading the virus outbound. This is a vital component of enterprise security. Conrad Herrmann, CTO of Zone Labs, will explain the challenges presented by these new types of threats and how inbound and outbound blocking and enterprise-wide policy enforcement, quell the risks of these next-generation attacks.

Poll

VB100 certification