« One Way to Fight Identity Theft | Main | Disturbing New Microsoft Patch Attack »

Listen to or download the entire 8:56 podcast below:

Download file

What follows is a summary of my discussion with Ruben Dias, the President of Panda Software Canada, where we discuss the current state of security, why malware has flourished in the face of so many security solutions, steps people can take to use the internet more safely, Panda's security solution, the launch of Panda’s new website, Infectedornot.com, and finally, what threats to expect in the future.

Can you give me a quick overview about the current state of Internet security?

The current era is very strange because currently, the users feel secure. And actually, the truth is that we are living in a period that security is in a major threat. Because some years ago, people were feeling that they were threatened by viruses and they were correct. And these viruses were widespread. But now the vulnerabilities and the threats are very different. So that the sensation is that people are secure, although they are not secure anymore because of types of threats and vulnerabilities are completely different. So I would say that it's a very peculiar area that we are living in, in terms of security right now. The truth is, that people are not secure anymore.

How have hackers changed their strategies to become so successful?

Well, it has everything to do with motivation, you know. Because what motivates those people that were hacking some years ago, we all know that they wanted to be famous. They wanted to, you know, just gain attention. And the type of virus that they were producing were exactly to have that effect. They wanted people to look at them as being great programmers or great hackers. But now, the motivation is completely different. We have seen the motivation being purely money. So it's a financial issue right now. There's crime, there's financial crime involved in computer security nowadays. So the motivation is what has changed. Actually, the behavior of the hacker.

On your web site it says that Panda Labs detected more malware in 2006 than in the previous 15 years combined. At the same time, security solutions have also proliferated. Could you tell me why most security products fail then, to protect its users?

The answer is related to the motivation behind the hacker right now. You know, the amount of new threats that appear daily is tremendous. I'll tell you one thing. There is no security company nowadays that can cope with the quantity of viruses or threats that are being put out everyday. It has everything to do with the variations that the hackers come out with. Because what they actually wanted to do is to take control of your PC anyhow and to steal information. So that motivation, what they want is to hide themselves and to hide themselves, they don't find any better way to do it then to come up with a lot of variations.

So a lot of different type of codes, similar codes but a lot of different ones. Let's say 100, 200. So there's no security company that can cope with the quantity that is brought up everyday. So this old approach of handling these new threats no longer works. We need a new approach to confront this new threat.

What are some of the key steps people need to take to use the Internet safely?

They are quite simple. The steps that people can take--most of them are related to avoiding social engineering. Because social engineering has to do with taking abuse of yourself in some way. So you should be very aware of these tactics. If you get something very attractive, you should be suspicious. So your behavior towards a very attractive invitations, you should suspect about it. That's the first part.

And also, you shouldn't be using your PC everyday as an Admin. You shouldn't give Admin rights to your PC when you use it everyday. That's a common sense way of protecting yourself. And obviously having a good security solution, updated. But not only updated! Make sure that you have proactive technology that can do behavior analyses. Because as we have seen, the signature-based protection no longer works. So you need something else. You need behavior analysis. As a type of social intelligence, avoid these overwhelming threats that appear everyday.

So how does Panda help with Internet security?

We were the first company to come out with a proactive technology back in 2004. Nowadays, there are several other solutions. They have some type of integration of proactive technologies. We have come up with something called collective intelligence. What collective intelligence is, is mainly three parts. First, we have an automatic system to collect what is good behavior and bad behavior through the usage of our solutions. Then we have an automatic process through a server, a server infrastructure that we have built up artificial intelligence to automatically categorize and classify. And the third part is to make it available to our users. So all this, we call it collective intelligence and it's an automatic process. We can no longer depend on people looking at the code and coming up with the solution. So that's why we have already three years of actually doing this and we are becoming more and more efficient.

I heard you mention collective intelligence. Is that related to your, I think, relatively new web site, www.infectedornot.com, which Panda has started?

Exactly. You know, Infectedornot is a way that we also give to the community to participate in this process. It has everything to do with the Web 2.0 that everyone is talking about. We want to be collective and collaborate on this security issue also. So the way we are seeing things, if we have this tool that people will use and people will verify, am I protected or not? Am I infected or not? Then in that case, they are probably going to have a surprise. The truth is that our figures right now, we are still in a pre-launching stage and our figures right now is that the consumer base is over 50% infected, which is even with security solutions installed. And in the corporate area we have Malware Radar which is a similar tool but for a corporate environment which what it does is actually scan the whole infrastructure to verify if the infrastructure is protected or not. So these tools are a way of us making it freely available to the community to participate in this collective intelligence.

What threats do you see coming in the future, and how should we prepare for them.

You know, we don't have that magic ball, that crystal ball, but we can see some trends. And the trends are clearly what we have started in this conversation, is that the trends are motivated by money. So money will continue to be the motivation of the hacker. We will see more and more of the social engineering techniques, so that's why we should clearly identify and avoid them. So these two areas being motivated by money and being very oriented towards hiding themselves, you know. Some years ago, again, the people were trying to make them popular through viruses. Now they want to hide themselves. So we will see more and more spread out and specific epidemics originate, let's say, but not generalize. We have a lot of them and this makes the situation very threatful.

Posted by pschooff in Podcast |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.ebizq.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1838