Everyone strives to be the best they can, whether that’s in personal or business life, but it’s always nice when someone gives you a pat on the back and confirms that you are at the top of your game – and that’s just what has happened to Symantec Managed Security Services (MSS), not just once, but three times!

Symantec MSS has been positioned by Gartner Inc. in the Leaders Quadrant of the 2011 Magic Quadrant for Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) North America report1. In addition, Symantec received “Strong Positive” ratings in Gartner’s MarketScope Reports for Managed Security Services in both Europe2 and Asia/Pacific3.

The point to take away here is that Symantec MSS is the only vendor to take the highest level of appraisal in each geographical report – the only vendor with a global leadership position.

Symantec Managed...

by Clint Sand, Director of Security Strategy & Advisory

Generally we see most breaches are sourced from 3 distinct groups. Malicious Insiders, Well-meaning Insiders, and Malicious Outsiders. Each source, and their unique motivators, should ideally be emulated in a testing process to ensure the results match real-world conditions. Honeypots are useful for understanding the behavior of a Malicious Outsider and to some extent, the Malicious Insider. They are like attacker surveillance cameras. Organizations often leverage honeypots to learn about attacker behavior, deflect attacks to lower valued targets, and discover the new zero day vulnerabilities attackers are exploiting in a system.

However, if you look at the attack phases of a typical Advanced Persistent Threat, a good majority of the high-profile breaches are the result of spear phishing. Well-meaning end users have become the most effective targets for attackers looking to penetrate your environment. Why...

The current mantra from most business experts seems to be that your organization has to have a social media strategy.  They say you must have a regularly maintained Facebook Page, you must Twitter regularly and you should be using as many social media tools to reach your audience as possible.  If you Google the phrase “social media strategy” you’ll return more than 8.5 million hits.  What no one talks about is the necessary steps to ensure the security of your social media presence.

It is not enough to have a social media strategy, you must also have a social media security strategy, and that security must be interwoven into every aspect of your organization’s social media presence. 

The fact is, the more social media exposure your organization has the more your security risk increases.  Social media sites are a prime research vehicle and target for today’s attackers, and the more your organization...

Note: This is the first in a series of blog postings by Steve Parrott, Director of Product Management for Symantec MSS regarding the on-going evolution of the security marketplace and customer threat environment.

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One of the things that I am always asked by customers of Symantec MSS is how the MSS environment will evolve over the next three to five years. While most CISOs understand the threat environment of today, what keeps them up at night is trying to understand the threat environment of tomorrow and all of the implications and risks. And customers are desperate to understand. They are literally being attacked from all sides, constantly, and with tremendous potential for ever greater losses of information, money or reputation. With risks being as high as ever, the question is often how can Symantec MSS help them...