Endpoint Security Blog

With all of the options in the marketplace today, small businesses must secure customer trust and loyalty to remain competitive. Regardless of the industry, their customers are looking for the best quality, value and service and they will quickly move on if their needs are not met. They also want to know that their personal information, like their credit card numbers and bank account information, is protected when they deal with a small business.

Today, so much of our valuable information resides on computers. It’s how we work. So it is expected that small businesses would be concerned about keeping their customers’ personal and financial information safe. In fact, according to the recent Symantec 2010 SMB Information Protection survey, almost three-quarters of SMBs are somewhat/extremely concerned about the loss of crucial business information. This does not come as a surprise when you consider that 42 percent have actually lost confidential or proprietary...

2011 State of Security Report: 3,300 Companies Sound Off

Earlier today, we announced the findings of our 2011 State of Security Survey, which explored the state of cybersecurity efforts in organizations of all sizes. The findings of the survey* – based on 3,300 responses in 36 countries – reveals that (for the second year in a row) security is the leading business risk they face, ahead of traditional crime, natural disasters and terrorism. However, results from the survey also indicate that organizations are getting better at fighting the war against cybersecurity threats. While the majority of respondents suffered damages as a result of cyberattacks, more respondents reported a decline in the number and frequency of attacks compared to 2010.

The survey revealed additional positive findings. For example, 71...

In one of Alan Shimmel's recent posts to his excellent The Ashimmy Blog, "Do you really need desktop AV anymore?" he states that surfing in safe neighborhoods and practicing safe computing (or safe-hex, as one of his readers posted in the comments section) can provide adequate protection. He is wrong. There are no safe neighborhoods on the internet.  Millions of legitimate web pages are hijacked every year and used to distribute malware. In the past we have seen newspapers, government sites, even the FBI’s home page hijacked – sometimes the networks serving ads to those and thousand of other legitimate sites have been taken over. Worse, malware or links to infected sites are often distributed through sources of trust such as...

Today Microsoft introduced Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010.  4 years after Symantec they finally introduced Integration with Configuration Manager, Vulnerability Shielding and Firewall Management – the equivalents of which have all been in Symantec Endpoint Protection for the past 4 years.   

The new version of Forefront still lacks functions we consider essential to endpoint security, including:

• Device control
• Application inventory or application control (outside of AppLocker)
• Access control self enforcement
• Mac & Linux support – only a promise that sometime next year “details on the timing of the Mac/Linux release will be available”
• Optimizations for virtual environments - no resource leveling – no way to prevent av storms in virtual environments
• Bootable recovery disk or a tool equivalent to Symantec’s Power Erasure

A few additional thoughts:...