The term 'sprawl' seems to be gaining momentum in IT circles. The culprit, we are told, is virtualisation: while creating, duplicating and even cloning new virtual machines may be much simpler than procuring their physical equivalents, organisations can end up with so many of the things that they start causing management problems. IT isn't straightforward to manage at the best of times, and the usual issues of operations, patching and licensing can quickly get out of control if the number of systems gets out of hand.

One area in particular that can suffer problems is backups, and it's not rocket science to work out why. Backups require transfers of sometimes-large quantities of data, from system, application and user repositories: more machines equals more data to be transferred, which can increase pressure on physical server and network interfaces particularly if everything sis being backed up at once. Lose control of the systems in a sprawl situation, and...

Symantec is the leading mobile security provider of unified customer protection for the corporate, enterprise and individual mobile user. Next Generation Network Protection offers comprehensive proactive protection from the increasingly prominent threat of mobile viruses, malware, inappropriate content, unsolicited communications and spam at a corporate and consumer level – right in carrier networks. This is part of a service hierarchy that delivers unified protection and revenue generating services across all mobile and wireless bearers, for all technologies including messaging, internet and voice usage.

Download the whitepaper by clicking on the link below.

Just a few years ago, information security used to be all about education. People and organisations just weren't aware of the threats - apart from a few headline-grabbing examples of malware such as the Melissa worm, ILOVEYOU or the Anna Kournikova virus, the risks of which seemed to diminish over time.

As we know however, the past ten years have seen a shift from such examples and towards more complex forms of attack. Social engineering, targeted attacks, web-site drive by, man-in-the-middle, spyware and trojans, indeed, barely a month goes by without some new form of attack being documented and publicised. What with an increasingly complex pool of devices to protect, companies and security vendors have to remain...

On October 14, 2011, Symantec was alerted to a sample by a research lab with strong international connections that appeared very similar to the Stuxnet worm from June of 2010. This threat has been named W32.Duqu [dyü-kyü] because it creates files with the file name prefix “~DQ”. The threat was recovered from an organization based in Europe. Symantec has confirmed Duqu is a threat nearly identical to Stuxnet, but with a completely different purpose.

Please read the Symantec blog post and the Analysis Paper for more information.