The Emerging Enterprise - Security Update 2003 Part 2

The Emerging Enterprise - Security Update 2003 Part 2

Internet Risks

Although America's move to war and increased the threat of cyberterrorism, Internet Security Systems' (ISS) "Internet Risk Impact Statement" for first quarter showed that war had little impact on Internet threats. Even so, there was a 36.6 percent increase in the number of security incidents and confirmed attacks from the prior fourth quarter of 2002.

The increase in security incidents was coupled with a tremendous jump in overall security events, ten times the amount of events in the fourth quarter of 2002. This spike in security events, typically in the form of suspicious activities like automatic probing and scanning for vulnerabilities in computer systems, directly correlates to a major increase in the number of new worms and hybrid threats tracked in the first quarter of 2003, which totaled 752 compared to 101 in the fourth quarter of 2002.

Chris Rouland, director of Internet Security Systems' X-Forceı security research and knowledge services organization, noted, "The large increase in mass mailing, highly persistent worms, and security events indicates that this year will be challenging for security officers and administrators around the world. These levels are consistent with our forecasts that show a steady amount of malicious activity on the Internet throughout 2003. Hackers, criminals and hactivists continue to disrupt services, commit online theft, and cause outages across the Internet by exploiting unprotected computers, especially by focusing their activities on critical and widely-deployed systems and infrastructure."

SMB's need to watch for two serious threats —

Worms can cause dramatic damage worldwide with a minimum of effort on the part of the attacker. Slammer was unleashed on unpatched Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and succeeded in infecting more than 200,000 machines in just 10 minutes. It was the most disruptive event ever noticed on the Internet, and there is a plethora of worms out there.
Companies that rely on the research ISS, Network Associates, Symantec and other security vendors conduct as their first line of defense on vulnerabilities should beware—hackers are beginning to get to the hole first!

Other findings —

Friday is a popular attack day — 26 percent of security events occurred over weekends in the first quarter of 2003 as compared to 23 percent in the fourth quarter. Friday showed the highest rate of security events throughout the quarter, registering an average 2,301,777. However, the Slammer worm discovered by ISS X-Force began its propagation on Saturday, January 25th.
Suspicious activity and unauthorized access lead the attack categories with 73.5 percent of total events and 11 percent respectively.
Retail is the most popular target — after tracking 20 industry sectors targeted by attacks in the first quarter, the following major industries ranked in the following order of most to least attacked. Retail - 35 percent; Financial Services - 11.5 percent; Healthcare - 9 percent; Manufacturing - 9 percent; Federal and Local Government 1 - percent.
Worms and hybrid threats outpaced discovered vulnerabilitiesıthere were 752 threats compared to 606 discovered vulnerabilities in Q1 2003. This statistic reveals a new security trend, which demonstrates that exploit development from the hacking underground is catching up with security research. This trend was observed with the recent X-Force alert on March 17th, documenting a vulnerability within the WebDAV component of Microsoft IIS Web server. Experts often describe this condition as "zero-day" attacks, or attacks against software vulnerabilities not yet known by software vendors.
The vast majority, over 86%, of events come from US IP addresses. So breathe a sigh of relief, for the time being, but continue to worry about our homegrown hackers.

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