Protecting the data assets of your small business.
Posted by : Jonathan Brody
Even the smallest of businesses are not immune to Internet
threats. Just a single security breach could bring your business
operations to a halt, decreasing productivity, and potentially
compromising data integrity, customer confidence, and revenue flow. And
today's threats can come from anywhere--wired or wireless networks,
internally or externally.
It seems like only yesterday that a
firewall and antivirus were all a small business needed to protect its
data. By current standards, yesterday's threats were slow-moving and
predictable, and blocking them at the network perimeter kept their
impact to a minimum. And studies have shown that small businesses often
leave large security gaps. A recent survey of 1,000 small businesses by
Symantec and the Small Business Technology Institute found that small
businesses are largely unaware and uneducated about information security
risks and their economic repercussions. Twenty percent of small
businesses surveyed have yet to implement simple virus scanning on
email.
Unfortunately, even simple virus scanning on e-mail won't
cut it in today's business environment. Today, information is
continually moving among employees, partners, and customers--few of whom
operate within the controlled sphere of the small business network. Each
endpoint represents a potential entry point for cybercriminals who are
increasingly intent upon compromising sensitive information for
financial gain.
Clearly, the network is no longer the perimeter.
Today, people are the perimeter. Consequently, information protection is
no longer about protecting the network. It's about protecting
information wherever it resides.
A Data Explosion
In the digital age, business data constantly flows among an
expansive range of organizations and individuals whose security status
varies. Small businesses are dependent on these interconnections for the
performance of their business--for the on-time delivery of goods and
services as well as their financial performance.
For example,
salespeople might connect to the small business network through a hotel
network. Guests access the Internet through the wired or wireless LAN.
Mobile workers at kiosks check email and download attachments. Customers
transact business online from home Internet connections and public
wireless hot spots.
Protecting information in such an environment
requires the elimination of exposures not only inside the network but
also across business boundaries. This includes endpoint enforcement
through protection, configuration, and usage, as well as endpoint
compliance--and that means securing all endpoints and all access points
all the time.
Of course, simple user error can also put small
businesses--not to mention their customers, partners, and employees--at
risk for a security breach. For example, a government agency recently
revealed that an employee's laptop was stolen--along with personal
information on a staggering 2.2 million active-duty military
personnel.
Evolution of a Threat
What a
difference a few years can make, particularly where the Internet is
concerned. In 1988 the first Internet worm was launched. It spread to
just 6,000 computers--of course, that represented one-tenth of all the
computers on the Internet at the time.
Those were the good old
days. Where yesterday's threats were noisy and visible to everyone,
today's threats are silent and often go unnoticed--by design. After all,
with the current price of a successful adware and spyware install at
somewhere between five and 20 cents a pop, stealth pays.
That's
not all. While earlier threats were indiscriminate and hit virtually
anyone and everyone, today's threats are highly targeted and
regionalized. Cybercriminals are in it for the money now, unleashing
quiet but sophisticated, modular malicious code aimed at perpetrating
identity theft, extortion, and fraud.
In turn, the task of
containing, managing, and protecting data has gone from challenging to
being vastly more difficult, complex, and critical. Information
protection has clearly moved far beyond network security and now extends
to protecting data regardless of where it is.
After all, lose the
data and you lose the business.
Focus on the
Information--Not the Network
To reduce information exposure,
small businesses must secure both their managed and unmanaged
endpoints--because that's where the information resides. Since managed
endpoints are within an organization's administrative control,
persistent agents can be used to implement appropriate countermeasures.
This is important, as these endpoints often have more extensive rights
for accessing and storing information, which in turn signals the need
for more robust security measures.
Among the most effective tools
for protecting managed endpoints are antivirus, personal firewall, and
intrusion protection technologies. While antivirus tools are ubiquitous
today, the most effective protection comes from technologies that
include anomaly or heuristic-based threat detection as well as
antispyware capabilities.
Personal firewalls are another widely
recognized countermeasure, although their effectiveness is limited to
protecting at the network layer. Personal firewalls often cannot stop
application layer attacks that utilize protocols and connections allowed
by their rule base. Nevertheless, personal firewalls are a valuable
component of managed endpoint protection as they permit only traffic
that is explicitly allowed by policy.
Intrusion protection
technologies offer another layer of security for managed endpoints.
Host-based intrusion protection complements antivirus by guarding
against unknown attacks that operate at the system and application
levels. Network intrusion protection tools guard against network-based
threats such as worms. While some network intrusion protection solutions
rely on signatures and, therefore, guard against known attacks, other
solutions provide more advanced mechanisms such as vulnerability-based
signatures and protocol anomaly detection to keep unknown threats
out.
Rounding out these more common security technologies are
application control, host integrity checking, patch management, buffer
overflow protection, and encryption technologies. Application control
picks up where personal firewall technology leaves off and further
defines allowable traffic. Host integrity checking evaluates various
security attributes to ensure that the endpoint is defended against any
threats it may encounter.
Patch management identifies and
eradicates weaknesses in software code, while buffer overflow protection
monitors endpoints for known and unknown threats that attempt to exploit
buffer overflow vulnerabilities. Finally, file and disk encryption
guards against information loss in the event that an endpoint such as a
laptop is stolen or lost.
Protecting unmanaged endpoints is also
critical in order to reduce the risk of information exposure. However,
because these devices are outside an organization's control, they
require "on-demand" protection that does not impose changes or
restrictions beyond the duration of a specific interaction.
To
that end, small businesses can leverage a number of on-demand
technologies, including host integrity checking, cache cleaning,
malicious code protection, firewalls, and a secure virtual workspace.
On-demand host integrity checking and on-demand firewalls provide much
the same protection as their agent-based counterparts, while on-demand
cache cleaning removes information remnants from browsers and
application-specific caches when a session ends.
Of course, no
information protection solution is effective without the cooperation of
the people who actually use the managed and unmanaged endpoints. While
business security responsibility and accountability is widely
acknowledged as a vital yet challenging component of an information
security strategy for any small business, its effectiveness can be
greatly enhanced when organizations carefully codify requirements and
responsibilities and apply automation to ease enforcement.
As the
borders of a typical small business network continue to expand, the
potential for attack continues to grow. The good news is that small
businesses can conduct business online more safely by staying informed
about the latest technologies required to protect their most vital
asset--information. Together with enforceable employee best practices
for security, small businesses can leverage technology to keep a handle
not only on systems under their immediate control but also on the
devices upon which their valued partners, employees, and customers rely
to do business in a highly interconnected world.
Jonathan Brody is a senior director with Symantec's
Security and Data Management Group.
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