The Security Issues 2010 Will Bring...

Apps have been a very popular technology for 2009. From a security point of view application firewalling is proving to be very important as businesses need to be able to control what employees are doing within applications such as Facebook and Skype, they could be file sharing and instant messaging other users that might not be trustworthy. 

With many businesses only having basic application control at the moment, allowing employees to access feature rich websites can potentially put businesses at risk. 

Palo Alto Networks provide a unique technology in the firewall marketplace that allows businesses to gain application usage visibility and affect a policy to control social networking site access from almost any aspect such as chat, email, apps and file transfer.

In particular Web 2.0 has grown dramatically in 2009 and will continue to pave the way for larger malware attacks in the SMB space in 2010. The question of security is significant as integrated functionality is used to convey information. 

With Social networking sites their very essence is defined by feature rich functionality and this encompasses web, chat, audio, video, pictures and integrated applications. 

There are issues of personal data to consider with profile information but the most significant risks exist with the integrated applications as these can be hosted by a third party and so are not subject to any security or information assurance controls. 

In the last 18months it has been demonstrated that these applications can have malware or functionality issues, which have serious security implications.

Trends are also indicating that hackers are moving away from attacking the operating system that resides on endpoints and servers, and are now targeting the applications that sit on top, this allows them to go unnoticed for longer. 

There are now 1000s of applications available and patching doesn’t seem to be keeping up, it is far less advanced and efficient, which potentially provides hackers with an open target.