Guest Article by Louise Goldstein

The research questioned over 15 thousand internet users, between the ages of 18 and 65, from 11 countries. The conclusion of the study revealed Internet users had mythical ideas about cyber security which left them vulnerable to threats.

Software internet security is a nightmare for businesses and with the rise of social networking at work (via such business sites as Xing, Plaxo and LinkedIn), especially amongst the younger generation, things are getting worse, not better.

There is also a blurring of the message in this area, because although companies are paranoid about problems of being hacked, they still support their workers in promoting their companies on the very same sites which they take issue with.

But businesses are being warned that they have to weigh up the benefits of increased online sales via social media networking, as against the chance of having their systems compromised by hackers, or indeed, putting the company into an invidious position.

There are a number of things for companies to look out for, including using social media for employment vetting purposes, but then falling into the trap of asking ‘illegal’ questions, such as those directed about age, race, or religion.

You should also be aware of giving away too much information about the company and its working practices, which could be used in similar ways that personal ID fraud is exploited.

Be careful also not to damage the company’s reputation, or standing via an inappropriate message on a social media website, or message thread.

A spokesman for the company which gave the warning, Commissum, said:
“The risks of using social media encompass all aspects of the business; legal, employment, technical, operational and reputation. The decision to use social media should therefore be taken after careful consideration of the business reasons and benefits, an assessment of all risks and the implementation of comprehensive controls to mitigate the risks which must include policies and appropriate user training and awareness measures.”

In short, sometimes, software internet security issues should become before fancy social media strategies.

Guest Article by Neil Camp 

One huge Botnet was recently reduced to a trickle as one set of anti-spammer guardians fought hard to bring them down. The figures are truly amazing, with some issuing billions of individual spam emails each year, meaning that millions are being sent on a daily basis.

But although these successes are worth a collective round of applause, the sheer size of the spam operations has worrying implications for all to see. Spam started as a mischievous trick on friends – it’s innocent beginnings belong to a different time now.

But once the crooks saw the advantage in sending out emails to a somewhat gullible database of email enthusiasts who appeared to park their brains elsewhere when items dropped into their inboxes, the flood gates opened. Some weren’t completely fictitious of course and no doubt many men have benefitted from under the counter Viagra, but offers of millions from dead kings, or pictures of curvy tennis stars which actually had dirtier things attached than a picture of a raised skirt, soon alerted most to the spammers deadly armoury.

Now the defences are more sophisticated and the computer security industry has woken up to the fact that it’s far better to stop the spam reaching its destination in the first place, than to rely on someone saying no to an offer of a forty million pound fortune from an African chief.

The various internet platforms and mail servers are now far more effective in stopping spam than they used to be, so there’s almost a desperation in the spammers actions now, as though they continually have to up the number of spam in order to get the one profitable hit.

But the crooks face a double whammy. Spam filters continually get better and people get more cynical. Therefore, the numbers have to ever increase, meaning that the servers which push through this rubbish will be easier to spot and bring down.

It sounds like a win win situation; unfortunately, it isn’t.

Spammers are not ‘geeks’ sat in their bedrooms romantically fighting the system to earn a loaf of bread. Nowadays they are geeks sat in huge offices fighting the system to earn their organised crime bosses far more than a loaf of bread (in fact, millions of loaves).

And organised crime bosses always have an eye on the takings. If profits begin to drop, it won’t be a prosaic shrug and a bringing down of the shutters for a while, Make no mistake, the crime bosses (and some Governments), will have invested a fair bit of their ill-earned gains to set up their spam operations and walking away from that, and the potential rewards, means that the focus will switch elsewhere.

Spam will maybe last another five years as a profitable, albeit mostly illegal, road to riches. But as it starts to die, the real danger is where the crime bosses will direct their geeks attention then.

One battle might go to the computer security industry, but the cyber war is far from over.

Guest article by Neil Camp 

German based Zynamics, an internet security company which focuses on software analytics, was founded in 2004 by Thomas Dullien, the current Chief Executive Officer.

Zynamics researches the automation of reverse engineering and code analysis. In terms of its product line up, it produces four reverse-engineering tools: BinDiff, VxClass, BinNavi and BinCrowd. These four products are used by thousands of researchers in the internet security community.

Google was tight lipped about price it paid for the company and exactly where it fits, but experts believe that it will be used to enhance the protection already used by them to protect their users.

The latest incident to hit Google concerns a number of missing Gmails, although they have since announced that the problem was not a virus, but a software bug. There’s a big difference between the two. Viruses are ‘man made’ bits of code that are developed and inserted into applications for nefarious reasons. A software bug is usually a faulty line of code (say a missing instruction) which can cause a shutdown, or a wrong action. The problem is, that many bugs are in effect holes in the wall through which barbarians can exploit and deliver viruses.

So although bugs are innocent, they are often the precursor to a cyber attack as they represent weak parts of the application’s defences.

In this case, Google have admitted that a number of emails went ‘missing’ (accounts were accidentally wiped) but, as they put it, were never lost. And because they are backed up on tape, they were replaced in a matter of days. They confirmed that just 0.02% of 170 million odd customers were affected.

Google handles such matters in their official Gmail blog and this is what it said:
"I know what some of you are thinking: how could this happen if we have multiple copies of your data, in multiple data centres? Well, in some rare instances software bugs can affect several copies of the data. That’s what happened here. But restoring data from them takes longer than transferring your requests to another data centre, which is why it’s taken us hours to get the e-mail back instead of milliseconds. Thanks for bearing with us as we fix this, and sorry again for the scare.”

Google will be hoping, when it comes to internet security, for not too many scares in the future.

Guest Article by Neil Camp