Experton Group Weekly IT News

China and US Lead Nations in Internet-based Security Attacks

By: Jerald Murphy

A recent report released by Akamai Technologies has shown that China and the United States are well ahead of other countries in receiving Internet-based security attacks. In other news, Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) announced upgrades to its security testing software, while Verizon Business announced the availability of its new security service.

Focal Points:

• The first quarter report from Akamai showed that China and the United States account for 30 percent of the Internet security attack traffic. Akamai's quarterly report also showed that 23 unique network ports are targeted during attacks. Researchers from Akamai found attack traffic originating from 125 different countries. Some of the leading types of attacks they observed included denial-of-service attacks, de-peering events, and Web-site attacks. Other non-security related activities were seen to cause major events, such as a telecommunications service provider that made a routing change in its network that caused an Internet-based video sharing site to go offline. South Korea was observed to have the highest average user bandwidth, while Rwanda and the Solomon Islands had the slowest.
• Officials from HP recently announced an upgrade to security testing software that came from SPI Dynamics, a company HP purchased in 2007.  This security suits has three distinct elements: one for checking code integrity (DevInspect), another for QA testing (QAInspect), and a third element that checks for how applications function in a Web-based environment (WebInspect). HP's most recent upgrade adds new functionality to all three modules. These modules help companies test for any potential security problems before code is deployed. While this is good, Experton Group cautions that continuous application security testing must still be done in operations, since new threats continually appear, that may not have been known about at test time.
• Officials from Verizon, Inc. recently announced the availability of its new Universal Threat Management (UTM) security service. The service is built around Fortinet Inc.'s FortiGate systems. This service is available right now in the United States, and is also available in countries in Europe and Asia-Pac. This UTM services combines antivirus, anti-spam, firewall, intrusion prevention services (IPS), and virtual private networking (VPN).

Experton Group believes security managers will increasingly look to outsource commoditized security functions, but maintain internally business critical security elements such as encryption, identity management, and application development security testing. Testing applications during develop is important, but application testing must also be done in operations, since new threats will require reevaluating previously tested applications against both new security attacks, as well as new compliance regulations. IT executives should consider outsourcing security functions that are well established commodities, in order to focus internal security resources on policy development, enforcement, and analysis of next-generation security threats.