How organizations should respond to Internet safety?‏

Internet has become a necessary tool for day-to-day business activities and other communication. Also, blogs, social networking sites and other media tools have become the necessary part of today’s business. However, as per the latest data, after every 4.5 seconds one new infected webpage has been discovered, which sidelines the term trusted website to users. Thus, companies have to deal various financial and security risks from such breaches.

Here we discuss latest internet threats and various approaches required to safeguard users’ PCs and other resources.

Web-based malware: Exploiting trusted brands

Computer hackers do not discriminate between websites, while exploiting the vulnerabilities; therefore websites with high traffic volumes are most lucrative destination for attack. However, this does not mean that small websites are not vulnerable to hacking, they are always soft targets for professional hackers.

Recently, users have learned about the worms and malicious links from the email and other sources, but they are least bothered while using various social networking sites. Further, on these social sites easy sharing of personal information has opened a new horizon for web criminals. Therefore, such social networking websites have become the favorite target for today’s hackers.

In August last year, Facebook confirmed that about 2,000 users had been affected by a Trojan attack during displaying an animated graphic of a court jester blowing a raspberry. It is also reported that various Koobface worms were targeting these social sites. Initially it infected Facebook and MySpace, now Koobface aims other social networks, including MySpace, Bebo, hi5, GeoCities, Friendster and Tagged.

Anonymizing proxies

Various organizations are using URL filtering to check different web threats while web browsing. Thus, to dodge such filtering devices, new anonymizing proxies are fashioned daily and dispersed through blogs, forums and other websites. Developing such proxies is becoming a big business in the downturn economy and to identify and rectify such anonymizing proxies is difficult, tiresome and time-consuming task for IT administrators to fight them.

How organizations should respond?

Internet access has created a dilemma for IT administrators. They have to tackle web traffic from various social networking sites, blogs, forums and media portals, which have become important instruments for job recruitment, viral marketing, public relations and customer interaction. Thus, the companies have to follow a new approach for web security and control. These companies can follow various steps for web filtering.

1.    Status-based filtering: Various companies can adopt the policy of reputation-based filters to fight against web-based threats. These companies may form a catalog of sites according to the hosted malware or unwanted content and by filtering URLs based on “good” or “bad” reputation for having proven tool against computer threats. However, this approach will not offer protection, when legitimate and proven websites are hijacked.

2.    Real-time predictive malware filtering: Here, all the internet traffic has to pass through a scanner designed to recognize new malwares. In the approach, all the web traffic is checked through a combination of signatures and behavior based technologies. It also follows bi-directional scanning, where both the user request to, and the information returning from are scanned. However, this type of filtering is uncommon in the today’s market, as various IT vendors are using only signatures.

3.    Content-based filtering: It checks all the web traffic and will decide the true file-type of content. After that, as per your company’s policy, you can allow or disallow this traffic. For example, using only business-type content, organizations can reduce the risk of infection through windows.