Developer: How to protect your PC from spywares and phishing?

How to protect your PC from spyware and phishing?

Here's a Web security appliance to cull out all the malware with security features like Web reputation

Rakesh Sharma

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

BANGALORE, INDIA: This product from TrendMicro is an integrated gateway security solution for enterprises focused mainly on ftp and http traffic. Apart from anti-virus protection, it also includes protection from malicious applications, Trojans, spywares, and phishing.

Along with these security features one can also find access quota policies and IntelliTunnel. Access quota policy can be quite befitting in an organization where the bandwidth is limited. One can set limit for the bandwidth usage for a particular IP or group of IPs. IntelliTunnel is basically used for blocking all the IMs running on the client machines.

Price: NA
Meant For: Large and medium enterprises
Key Specs: Web reputation, anti-phishing, anti-pharming
Pros: Web reputation, good virus detection, access quota policy
Cons: None
Contact: Trend Micro India, Delhi, E-mail:
sales.in@trendmicro.com,
Tel: 42699000
SMS Buy 131281 to 56677

A new feature in IWSA 3.1 is the Web reputation, which is meant for blocking web site on the basis of the reputation the sites have scored. This device can be configured as bridge mode, forward proxy, reverse proxy, and ICAP. It has two-line display panel which is an added advantage, as the basic configuration can be done through it. You can also make security rules to block or scan ActiveX and Java applet.

The test
For our initial tests we configured this appliance in proxy mode. Configuring the device was an easy job as it has easy-to-use GUI for management. We tested it for a set of viruses and it was able to block most of them without any glitches, further in the spyware testing also it worked fine. Next, we configured the device to work in transparent mode (tests were done for both Full transparent and transparent mode).

We started the test by downloading a series of viruses and this device proved itself by blocking 90 percent of viruses on the first go. And among the 10 percent viruses which it was not able to block, most of them were either 16-bit or inactive viruses. So, which means the device is capable of handling around 99 percent of the live viruses. This result is good as compared to that of ZyXEL 70 and ZyXEL 35 (reviewed September 2007) and was equal to Cyberroam CR250i UTM (reviewed September 2007). The viruses on the list were mostly macro viruses, zipped, zipped up to 2nd level and DOS-based viruses.

Further we ran couple of phishing tests which this device detected and in result blocked the phishing web site. The anti-spyware capability was also good as compared to that of most UTM which we had tested earlier. We also tested its Web reputation capabilities, which is a unique feature in this device. For this test we tried to open a set of malicious web sites which the device was able to block instantly. Web sites that are known to be good or blocked by Web reputation but are needed for legitimate business can be added to the approved list, so that they do not get blocked. Note that approved web sites are approved globally for all users.