Doing the spyware shuffle

Walking around Interop this week, I sometimes had to check my badge to see where I was. No, it wasn’t just the talking stuffed camels in the lobby of my hotel -- the Egyptian-themed Luxor -- that made me think I was in some Bob Hope-Bing Crosby bad road-movie dream. It was also all the security products on display.

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The Wireless Pavilion in particular seemed full of security products, as vendors seek to plug the latest hole to spring a leak in corporate networks. Even during John Chambers’ keynote, the Cisco CEO harped on security. According to Chambers, security was the top issue among CTOs and CIOs Cisco surveyed.

And Cisco didn’t come to Interop with a big bag of nothing in terms of security. It unveiled the ASA (Adaptive Security Appliance) 5500, a new line of integrated security products for branch offices, SMBs, and large enterprises. Similarly, Cisco rival Juniper Networks announced its Enterprise Infranet Architectural Framework, a way of designing SSL VPN networks with increased security features.

There was some pretty good evidence this week as to why IT managers are so concerned about security. The State of Spyware Report from Webroot showed that, in the first quarter of 2005, 88 percent of Spy Audit scans found some form of unwanted program (Trojan, system monitor, cookie, or adware) on consumer computers.

Believe it or not, that is down slightly (by 1 percent) from the fourth quarter last year. Research from the report also indicates that various forms of spyware -- pop-ups, home-page hijackers, search redirection, and host file and DNS poisoners -- generate an estimated $2 billion in revenue annually. These numbers indicate that this previously unmeasured market may be approaching 25 percent of the already established market of online advertising as reported by the Internet Advertising Bureau, according to Richard Stiennon, Webroot’s vice president of threat research.

“Our research shows that some form of spyware, adware, or potentially unwanted software can be found on 87 percent of corporate PCs. This figure is disconcerting from a security perspective and also from an IT support perspective, as spyware can often slow down the performance of an entire network,” Stiennon said.

The Webroot report also examines recent incidents of real spyware exploits that have crippled some enterprises, including the attempted multimillion-dollar theft from a major international financial institution by a hacker using a planted keylogger.

The complete State of Spyware Report is available at webroot.com/stateofspyware. Check it out.

If you aren’t a Green Day American Idiot and if you think you’re not that involved in corporate computing because you steer clear of the Windows operating environment, that doesn’t mean you’re immune from attack. A new report from the SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security (SANS) Institute says that versions of iTunes prior to 4.7.1 can be exploited on both Windows and Mac platforms. Read the SANS Institute report at sans.org/top20/Q1-2005update.

It’s not good news, but at least it’s not a talking stuffed camel.