Disproportionate damage is caused by relatively few
cyber-attacks and vulnerabilities. Simon Moores urges strong
defensive action.
Statistics, they’re everywhere, the plankton
that feeds the voracious appetite of the Internet. Being an
aviation historian, I was fascinated to stumble across a website
last week, where one person is devoting his energy to recording the
scores of every ranking fighter pilot of the Second World War,
Allied and Axis (see link at end).
What surprised me is that the top 100 German
aces were, between them, responsible for the loss of 15,000 allied
aircraft and this statistic, sparked a comparison in my mind with
the results of the latest Symantec Internet Threat Report, which,
for the first time, consolidates data from the company’s recent
acquisition of RipTech and SecurityFocus.
The report, which is quite possibly one of the
most detailed the industry has yet seen, illustrates how internet
threats have intensified and evolved in many ways, while remaining
relatively stable along other criteria. Although the number of
overall attacks decreased last year the overall number of
vulnerabilities rose alarmingly. Symantec documented 2,524 new
vulnerabilities in 2002, up a whopping 81.5% from the previous
year, which was bad enough in its own right.
The report argues that despite this decline,
many organisations, such as those in the financial services sector,
experienced a sharp rise in attack volume and relative attack
severity, while other companies, such as tenured security
monitoring clients, substantially reduced their risk profile.
Attack volume by country of origin was mostly
consistent with past studies. 80% of attacks were launched from
systems located in only 10 countries, and the US was by far the
largest source of attacks.
Approximately 60% of the documented
vulnerabilities were easily exploitable either because
sophisticated tools were widely available for use by the wannabe
hacker community or because exploit tools were not required at all.
As you might expect from this news and by leveraging the vast
supply of vulnerabilities, the more malicious of these "code
weasels" introduced several successful blended-threats over the
past six months.
In the silent warfare of cyberspace, the
potential for the introduction of entirely new, and potentially
more destructive, forms of malicious code and cyber-attack tools
represent a substantial future risk to business. Ironically, a
number of companies have fled to Open Source in the hope that this
will offer better security, but Symantec reveals that a number of
widely used open source applications were "trojanised" with
backdoors over the past year. The attacks targeted high profile
distribution sites that had taken significant efforts to protect
themselves.
The report comments: “This may serve as a
warning not only to other open source projects, but also to
commercial software vendors. Rather than targeting individual
systems, attackers are clearly exploring alternative ways of
impacting a large number of systems in a short period of time”.
Certainly, like the 100 or so top Luftwaffe
pilots of the Second World War, a relatively small percentage of
exploits and vulnerabilities appears to account for a
disproportionate amount of damage to Enterprise business across the
globe and more than a few big companies have gone spiralling down
in flames as a consequence of poor patching.
One interesting comment on the problem of
constant patching arrived from a reader last week, who, in the
light of Slammer, commented: “Apathy may be the cause of a certain
percentage of the unpatched SQL Server boxes. However, IT
understaffing and fear of managerial reprisals for patching a
production SQL Server installation and taking it out of commission
are more likely to be the culprits for Slammer infections.”
It all rather sounds to me like the modern
equivalent of Bomber Command stripping the armour plating from our
Lancaster bombers in the last war. The lessons of history never
stop repeating themselves but human nature remains sadly very much
the same and Symantec’s research clearly shows where we should be
placing our defensive efforts in future.
What's your view?
How do
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ZentelligenceSetting the world to rights with the collected thoughts and
opinions of the futurist writer, broadcaster and Computer Weekly
columnist Simon Moores.
For fighter pilot website,
click here.