“Beware of Social Networking”

If you were to pick the top-of-the-tree security waves marking the Indian topography, what would they be?

Increasing number of machines are being infected by Botnets in India. As shown by a recent Symantec MessageLabs Intelligence 2009 Annual Security Report , it is predicted that in 2010 botnets will become autonomous and migrate to a design based on "inbuilt self-sufficient code", able to adapt to anti-botnet activities and so improve their survival chances. The company had detected five million PCs (in that report) that are now working on behalf of the botnets.

What should Indian CSOs/CISOs (Chief Security Officers) be focusing on?

I would tell them to invest in education for users, have proper audits in place and keep their machines up to date. The internal aspect is very important. Having a technology in place is all well and good but people who are keeping up on social networking have to be taken into account too. Policy and monitoring is important. This web 2.0 aspect is not only worrying because of how much time employees spend there or how productivity gets affected but also how much malicious activity can happen in this medium. So make sure that education is paid top attention.

So people continue to be the eye of the storm when it comes to security threats?

The people component is always critical. Take mobile and endpoint security issues. An employee who is working from home (WFH) throws up a security angle too. It’s very important to make sure that security aspect is taken care of. Both Mobiles, and WFH trends are increasing and IT managers are under pressure to connect executive seamlessly. But there’s a risk involved with that exposure.

Where else is the wind swinging to?

We have seen turbulent spam activity throughout 2009, with average spam levels reaching 87.7 per cent, but with highs and lows of 90.4 per cent in May and 73.3 percent in February respectively. With compromised computers issuing 83.4 per cent of the 107 billion spam messages distributed globally per day on average, the shutdown of botnet hosting ISPs, such as McColo in late 2008 and Real Host in August 2009 appeared to make botnets re-evaluate and enhance their command and control backup strategy to enable recovery to take hours, rather than weeks or months. As I said, Botnets is an alarm area. It is predicted that in 2010 botnets will become autonomous intelligent, with each node containing an inbuilt self-sufficient coding in order to coordinate and extend its own survival.