By EDU H. LOPEZ
The threat of viruses, Trojans, worms, hackers and other forms of malware has increased dramatically and has grown into sophistication such that security systems only a few months old has been rendered obsolete.
"The nature of threats has evolved. In the early days of computing, the biggest security concern was that someone was going to physically walk off with a disk pack or set of tapes," says Michael Poyaoan, country manager of Fortinet, Inc.
He said the biggest threat would be the different malware that infect via network and email by impersonating a trusted user, thereby tricking users to unleash their deadly payload.
Not only is this counter-productive, these are hard to eradicate especially if a corporate entity has no solid policy on security and disaster recovery, said Poyaoan.
As networks became popular, both within and between organizations, it became possible for attackers to enter networks from outside, and to use connection-based attacks to reach and compromise private data and programs.
Poyaoan said the most damaging and fast-moving threats are content-based attacks that don’t require sustained connections in order to do damage.
Once a virus or worm has been inserted into a computer, it can act on its own and spread without a connection to the attacker.
The big challenge with content-based threats is that they are almost always delivered using connections that are inherently trusted - like e-mail and Web traffic.
In addition, content-based attacks don’t discriminate between different types of companies - they usually are spread automatically without regard for the size of a company or the value of their data.
This means that every company is at risk. The same phenomenon is true of other types of content threats including inappropriate Web content or email spam.
Fortinet has estimated that the cost to businesses of these threats is huge - at over $ 10 billion annually - and growing rapidly.
Its flagship product is FortiGate Antivirus Firewalls - a family of ASIC-accelerated RealTime Network Protection platforms.
The FortiGate Antivirus Firewalls are the most popular among companies in the Philippines. The FortiGate Antivirus firewalls, for their user-friendly firewall and anti-virus capability for testing the current security levels for weaknesses and plugging these holes before they invite hackers.
"Nothing beats having a solid security policy. We layered our security system so as to be dynamic in responding to new threats. However, the better educated the everyday user are, the more prepared the company is in responding to threats such as these," Poyaoan added.
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