Google Drives Security Topics in the Media

At Blackhat 2009 in Las Vegas there was an interesting panel discussion with some very seasoned journalists who cover the security market. The question came up: "How do you [journalists] decide which topics to cover?"

The answer included the expected: they rely on contacts, relationships, identifying trends and major news. But, almost all of the agreed on this: Google influences the news. Google traffic, page views, etc. Editors are business people too. And the more viewers the more the property is worth to advertisers. Thus, when Paris Hilton's cell phone gets hacked, or another star's twitter or facebook account are compromised, this counts as top news. People want to read it.

Similarly, the panel agreed there was a focus on the 'bad news'; the discovery of a vulnerability or exploit against a popular service or product. It was difficult for journalists to cover the solutions or positive trends as this would come close to promoting products, it was argued.

Endpoint Protection Group Test Started

NSS Labs is continuing its testing of anti-malware products and has started its first group test of endpoint protection products. We are testing the ability to protect against socially engineered malware downloaded from the web. This is a continuous live test that will measure time to protect, and average protection over time. All systems are connected to the live internet and subjected to actual downloads of actual, fresh malware every 4 hours over a period of 12 days.

Both consumer and corporate products are being evaluated. Stay tuned for more information or contact me with any questions (rmoy).

Two acquisitions in two weeks!

Within the last 2 weeks, two young companies that NSS Labs did independent certifications on were acquired. ThirdBrigade, which makes Host Intrusion Prevention Software (HIPS) was acquired by TrendMicro, one of the major antimalware vendors. This product filled a server-side gap in their product line.
Solidcore Systems, which makes memory firewall/application white listing products, was acquired by McAfee. The #2 antimalware vendor cum security vendor has added whitelisting to its billion dollar portfolio of antimalware, vulnerability and intrusion prevention products. In Q3 of 2008, NSS Labs had evaluated and certified the S3 Control Embedded product as NSS Approved for Host Malware Protection.
In a down economy, strong vendors go shopping for technologies to round out their product lines so they're in positions of strength when the buyers recover. Note, even with all the cost cutting and layoffs, there's always money left for strategic purposes. And if you're a CEO who is going to make a purchase in this economy, there's not much room for forgiveness. So, you can bet they did their homework on all sides: technology, sales execution, management, margins, balance sheet, etc. I'm pleased NSS Labs was able to help these young companies grow their businesses and wish them well in the next stages of their evolution.

NSS Awards First Gold in 5 Years

Yes, it's true. After a long 5 years of waiting for the next great product, at RSA Conference 2009 this year, we bestowed the prestigious NSS Labs Gold Award to IBM/ISS for it's Proventia Network IPS GX6116. IBM's was the first IPS to pass our new requirements for Gold, including the monthly recurring Security Update Monitor (SUM) program testing.

The GX6116 scored an average of 98.6% over the 3 consecutive months of testing. This new recurring testing program ensures that vendors are keeping up with current threat protection levels as advertised. Each month our engineers add new attacks to the test set according to our modified CVSS ranking of enterprise-relevant vulnerabilities. Unlike other tests, the vendors do not know which exploits will be used in this blind test. So 98.6% is pretty impressive. Most other products don't do nearly as well.

Also to be commended is the 8Gbps of real-world throughput achieved by the GX. Certainly, the IBM team worked hard and should be proud of their accomplishments on this rigorous test program. Here is Brian Truskowski, General Manager of IBM/ISS, accepting the NSS Gold Award; and his team: Dan Holden, John Pirc, Eric York, Greg Adams.

IBM isn't the only participant in the program. You can look forward to monthly testing from McAfee as well (coming soon).

Live Testing, web malware and assumptions...

NSS labs just uploaded the video archive of the Live Testing Webinar we did on 3/31. This was a webinar with live Q&A as a follow up to the initial browser security test report we performed on 6 different web browsers' ability to block socially engineered malware. As we roll out this new test methodology we wanted to give readers a deeper, interactive look into the testing process. There were a few questions from readers about how we did it, why it's more relevant than static or 'in-lab' dynamic testing, and how to interpret the different measurements, etc.
Interestingly we are hearing from two different camps. A few bloggers/journalists are finding their assumptions challenged about their favorite programs; "how can that be?" Meanwhile, 'hard core' security researchers are telling us they are glad to see more comprehensive empirical validation of some of their own data points. Regardless of whether your assumptions were validated or challenged, the data can now drive the conversation - and future research.

CBS News covers Socially Engineered Malware

The lead story tonight on CBS News' 60 minutes show was about socially engineered malware pushed by cyber gangs. One can see a good example of how users are tricked into clicking on links sent to them from supposed friends via social networking sites. Symantec's Steve Trilling also explained the workings of the Confiker worm and a keylogger trojan to the CBS anchor, Leslie Stahl. Very timely given the upcoming April 1 'trigger date' for Confiker. NSS Labs of course recently published a report on socially engineered malware testing we performed in early March.

web browser security study - socially engineered malware

NSS Labs just released a study we did on 6 leading web browsers' ability to stop socially engineered malware attacks. We tested Safari, Chrome, IE7, IE8, Firefox and Opera. This is extremely relevant today since the majority of malware is currently being delivered via the web. Trend Micro research puts it globally at 53%, dwarfing email at just 12%. Oh how times have changed.

Read the full report here: http://nsslabs.com/anti-malware/browser-security

Also notable, this was the industry’s first live test of fresh malware sites. We pulled thousands of URLs off the web in real-time and fed them into 6 different browsers (84 unique machines) every 2 hours. A lot of work went into building this test harness and you'll certainly be hearing more about it shortly. Also keep in mind, while the highest score was Microsoft at 69%, this is nothing to sneeze at. All of the sites were extremely fresh, and the time between detection on the web and testing in the harness was between 30 minutes and 2 hours. Compare this to a VB100, ICSA, West Coast or other wild-list type test where the malware is generally 2+ months old. Our new Live Testing model yields a much more real-world assessment of anti-malware detection rates.

As far as the results, we were pleasantly surprised at just how well IE8 did. Browsers, and IE8 in particular, are becoming a viable extra layer of security on top of anti-malware/endpoint protection.

Note: NSS Labs developed the test methodology and infrastructure independently. Microsoft provided funding.