GRC Journal - (Page 51) THREATS LuRkING ON MESSAGING PLATfORMS Security & Privacy JC: Spam is perhaps the most visible threat; however, it’s no longer just a nuisance but rather the vehicle by which dangerous payloads are delivered. As corporate networks evolved with the growth of the internet, they added extensive capabilities in the areas of web and extranet services, expanded their messaging infrastructure to handle a massive increase in message activity, and deployed their employees in multiple satellite offices and other remote locations around the world. This has exposed today’s organizations to numerous vulnerabilities, which, over the years, they have been forced to address one-by-one. Today, the cost of owning multiple point solutions is becoming prohibitive, motivating corporations to implement a more integrated approach to protecting the enterprise gateway. As a result, Secure Computing developed a vision for comprehensive security on the enterprise gateway that embodies the following core design principles: • Appliance-based delivery: All security functionality related to application intelligence and awareness needs to reside on a contained appliance, one that is built on a secure operating system platform, has a regulated set of interfaces to external systems, and encased in strong, tamper-proof hardware. • Application and content awareness: The gateway needs a deep knowledge of the underlying communication, an understanding of the context of the communication, and the ability to inspect and interpret the content. • Centralized policy, management, and reporting: The gateway must have the ability to be centrally configured, provisioned, and managed. This, along with consolidated reporting, should provide immediate feedback on the effectiveness while helping reduce the cost of ownership. • Bi-directional monitoring: The gateway needs to effectively scrutinize inbound traffic in order to block bad traffic from entering the network, while simultaneously performing deep inspection of outbound content to protect against leaks of confidential information or intellectual property. • Proactive protection: With the rapid increase in polymorphic threats, the ability to know immediately what could be dangerous is imperative. A gateway security system should be able to effectively thwart these attacks in real time. • User management and education: The security gateway needs to protect all types of sensitive data automatically, with easy-to-manage policies, comprehensive audit trails, and employee feedback loops. Losing credibility among end-users is an ever present threat associated with spam. Outside of immediate repercussions what are long-term effects of allowing spam to infiltrate an organizations messaging platform? How difficult is it for a company to regain trust among clientele? JM: Regaining trust of a customer is typically quite difficult. Organizations should proactively deal with spam and also show their clientele what measures they are employing. In this way, if there is an 180 BTQ Business Trends Quarterly Q1 2007 | www.btquarterly.com http://www.btquarterly.com
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