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Zombies, Viruses And Big Freakin' Worms!By DAVID R. BUTCHER, Assistant Editor, Customer Interaction Solutions Okay, the bad news first: There may be big worms and bad viruses out there enabling zombies to use computers for malicious attacks. The good news: There is a weapon to fight off destructive worms, calamitous viruses and killer zombies. No, this is not the latest apocalyptic blockbuster movie from Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, nor is it a long-lost-now-found Ed Wood film. Rather, messaging security provider CipherTrust, Inc. today announced that its IronMail appliance has not exposed any of its customers to the Zotob worm, a swiftly spreading virus that this week began exploiting a recently announced vulnerability in Microsoft Windows operating system. Zotob — which sounds to me like the name of a planet or villain made fun of in a "Mystery Science Theater 3000" episode — and its dozen of variants and copycat worms have turned many new PCs into zombies, hijacking them for the purpose of sending spam, viruses and other malicious attacks. CipherTrust Research determined that this massive influx of new zombies, connected to more than two dozen distinct zombie command and control centers (C&C), resulted in a 14 percent increase in the amount of spam traffic over the past 24 hours, according to a company statement a few hours ago. "The increase in spam traffic due to Zotob is enormous," said Dmitri Alperovich, CipherTrust Research Engineer. "Billions of new spam messages were delivered over the last 24 hours, which we believe are being sent by the hundreds of thousands of new zombies created by Zotob variants." CipherTrust is designed to stop zombie-driven attacks from entering an organization via e-mail with the company's TrustedSource reputation system, which detects zombies in real time and stops mail coming in from the zombie networks. (This is a good thing, because zombies are actually quicker than George Romero has historically shown.) Furthermore, CipherTrust's Zero Day Virus Protection adds an additional layer of security at the gateway. Zotob's rapid propagation velocity underscores the critical need for businesses to implement layered security strategies, including strong gateway defenses to protect their networks and e-mail infrastructure. "Our global intelligence, combined with our local protection, defends customers from both known and unknown attacks," said CipherTrust Chairman and CEO Jay Chaudhry in a company statement. "TrustedSource's precise analysis pinpoints each of the zombie networks and [makes] sure that IronMail blocks traffic from those zombies." CipherTrust's TrustedSource reputation system combines traffic data, blacklists, "whitelists" and network characteristics with the strength of CipherTrust's global network of more than 1,600 enterprises, healthcare institutions and government organizations. The result is the most complete and precise reputation system in the industry, claims the message-securing, zombie-bashing, virus-quelling, worm-destroying company. ----- David R. Butcher is Assistant Editor of Customer Interaction Solutions. He can be reached at [email protected]. He may not be able to respond immediately, however, because he had a great new idea for a screenplay while writing this article; he needs to start working on it now before the zombies actually do attack. To see more articles by David Butcher, please visit: http://www.tmcnet.com/tmcnet/columnists/columnist.aspx?id=100008&nm=David%20 R.%20Butcher |