‘Pay attention to People’

As per a report by Symantec, Botnets and spam are the top-notch threat components in emerging security updates. Would you agree?

Yes, I would say they are very serious IT threats.

Their report also points out that 66 percent of enterprises experienced cyber attacks in the past 12 months and these attacks cost Indian enterprises an average of over Rs.58,00,000 in lost revenue in 2009, apart from bigger financial losses due to loss of confidential data and productivity. Your comments.

I can’t say much. The number quoted could be as close or far from reality. It depends on the drill-down effectiveness of the study. Unless people can really come up and state in public about security mishaps and their own strategies, it’s really hard to comment on reports.

Blended threats, serious enough as pointed?

Yes. And this area is not an exception but a norm. Earlier a virus or an email attracted attention and redressal in a one-off way. Today, it’s all about everything is linked. We are a company that provides unified solutions.

What about the area of social networking?

Interesting and important. Websense has in fact recently reported how the latest scam targeted at Facebook users hit the public. The rogue app, which comes in many variants of "Who is checking your profile?", has improved its technique beyond the previous attacks we've seen. Rather than spreading a single app that Facebook can easily block, it tricks users into propagating the exploit by creating a brand new Facebook application that hands over the controls to the bad guys.

While the technique of enticing users with "Who is checking your profile?" isn't new, this particular propagation technique hasn't been seen before. Users are asked to create their own Facebook application, a process that Facebook has made really simple. Then, when the user enters their application's API and application secret, the new application is used to clone one of the template spam applications, each with a different name and icon to entice users

So what’s your market pulse-check giving out?

Websense tracks and reports monthly Email trends from the Security Labs. And no doubt the threat landscape is getting sophisticated and dangerous increasingly. Our recent findings show that 11 per cent of classified Web links within email were malicious, 84.8 per cent of all email was spam, 94.5 per cent of spam included an embedded URL and 1.5 per cent of spam emails where phishing attacks.

Would you put the ‘people’ component of an organization under the serious radar when it comes to security loopholes? Has the advent of technology changed their role in security leaks in a significant way?

It’s still people only. Talk of data leaks and you can not ignore this component. Many time it intentional and many times unintentional, but whichever way, you can not stand to ignore it.

How serious is the work-from-home part of security dimension?

Internal breaches can be very serious in such a scenario. On a general way, the inside-out leakage is still more prevalent than outside-in; because the former has more information and can prove more dangerous.

What makes Websense stand out in the security market today, specially amongst really strong competition and erstwhile market rulers?

Unlike competition, we manage all aspects of security, from Web, emails, data etc. Unified security is what we are about, be it software-based, application-based or cloud-related security. It can be picked and chosen as per network, architecture and business requirements.