SAN DIEGO, Ca. – The summer of 2007 may have been a hot one but in the case of spam and virus activity, it was downright cool, according to St. Bernard Software Inc., a global provider of security appliances and on-demand solutions.
The average number of messages St. Bernard’s customers received per day dropped nearly 10 per cent from July to September. In addition, viruses declined from approximately four per cent of all customer email in July to 1.8 per cent in September. On average, the company blocked 90 per cent of inbound messages as junk.
But with students going back at school and employees returning from vacation, St. Bernard predicted an increase in spam and viruses and social networking site visits in the coming months.
“With students and employees returning from vacation, we expect a spike in online activity, including spam and virus volume and visits to inappropriate Web sites,” stated Andrew Lochart, vice president of marketing and product management at St. Bernard.
He added that all students coming back to school with their new computers creates a pool of PCs for hackers to turn into zombies due to poorly protected school networks and policies.
In terms of visits to inappropriate Web sites, it can lead to bandwidth issues that can take up company resources and decrease employee productivity. Lochart suggested the adoption of Web filtering solutions and in turn fine tune policies to limit the use of Websites like Facebook that have nothing to do with their work.
Lochart said that the adoption of Web filtering gateways at businesses is 70 to 80 per cent but that isn’t good enough.
“What is much less common is to do malware scanning or virus scanning on the Web gateways, where only 15 per cent of businesses are doing that,” he said. “That is a number we will see grow significantly in the next two years, because the bad guys are finding it harder to get their viruses delivered through email and are looking for alternative means and the Web is becoming a more common technique for the bad guys.”
At schools and universities, the bandwidth issue doubles, he noted.
“Web 2.0 greatest uptake is with students,” he said. “Not only do you have problems with virgin computers infecting a school’s network with viruses but thousands of students will also be Facebooking all day.”
IT managers need to be prepared for bandwidth consumption at peak times during the day where campus networks will be at its knees, Lochart said. He suggested that universities limit access to high bandwidth sites at certain times a day.
There is also an issue with peer-to-peer sharing at universities. To combat, universities are beginning to identify and control peer-to-peer sharing via Web gateways.
He added schools and businesses that don’t filter Web access are leaving their networks wide open for attack.
This column was written by Vanessa Ho of ConnectIT
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