Network security: Outlook and trends

BANGALORE, INDIA: 2009 will be an year of ups and downs and this in turn will give rise to several new trends. The trends that will define network security space will be:

Consolidation: It is considered a silver bullet for enterprises today, as it provides cost-performance advantage for end customers.

Security virtualization: Provides users the manageability, scalability and modularity in securing next generation gateways.

3G: This will emerge as the next biggest threat to mobile security. Earlier this year, India, the world’s fastest growing mobile market, also became a part of this bandwagon. Indian mobile telephone operators signed up a record 10.42 million mobile users in October alone, despite the slowdown.

Fortinet believes that malicious activity on smart mobile devices such as smart phones has been low to date, but the anticipated consumer adoption of 3G and the new and business models it will enable, will open up a new and enormous market for cybercriminal activity.

All this paves open greater opportunity for virus infections and attacks and calls for a focussed approach to secure millions of hand-held mobile devices in operation today.

Surge in 10 GbE adoption: Bigger pipes means faster speed, but the it will also allow the good, bad and ugly to pass through. Thus, it is very important that enterprises, global as well as Indian, focus on enabling 10GbE security protocols that work along with the speed of the network. This should be the next area of focus to maintain integrity of high-speed networks.

Sensitive areas to be taken care of

Internet threats are becoming more and more sophisticated and blended threats, which combine viruses, worms, Trojans, etc., are the latest type of threat that targets companies’ networks.

A blended attack can come over multiple ports; say SMTP or POP as well as HTTP. At times, the only unique pattern among them is that target is same for each of these attacks.

Other current trends in the threat space include money-motivated attacks on banking accounts, denial of service attacks to exhort money out of e-commerce sites, as well as mobile attacks at large.

Moreover, phishing remains a key issue for most companies. Network security begins with user authentication, after which, the firewall enforces access policies such as what services are allowed to be accessed by the network users.

Though effective to prevent unauthorized access, this component fails to check potentially harmful contents, such as computer worms being transmitted over the network for a later high level analysis.

The author is regional director at Fortinet India & SAARC.