Small Businesses Hammered By Cybercrime

Following is quoted from an article by Ashesh Mamidi dated August 14, 2010 on InfoSec Island Begins (See link below for complete paper.) 

Small businesses today have shifted from paper records to electronically stored information.  This so-called digitalization process has helped small businesses attain a dramatically more efficient way of doing business.

On the other hand, this has also opened new doors for cyber criminals to penetrate a small businesses' data system.  This trend could result in massive financial and retail security fraud and breaches over the next decade.

Criminals will find new avenues to get malicious software onto a small business' computer systems.  There will be attempts to embed malicious software into the downloads of software from reputable vendors...........

The author, Ashesh Mamidi, is an Intern at Fortalice working under the tutilage of Theresa Payton. 

https://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/6481-Small-Businesses-Hammered-By-Cybercrime.html

Aanval iPhone App in the NEWS

Aanval iPhone App - Press Release

The Aanval iPhone Press Release went out this morning and oh WOW!  The media has really grabbed onto it.  The following is a listing of today's press activity regarding Aanval’s iPhone App.

Reuters  -  http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS95542+09-Aug-2010+PRN20100809

Forbes-http://www.forbes.com/feeds/prnewswire/2010/08/09/prnewswire201008090815PR_NEWS_USPR_____SF47279.html

TecTrends - http://www.tectrends.com/tectrends/news/urn:newsml:prnewswire.com:20100809:SF47279:1.html

TheStreet.com - http://www.thestreet.com/story/10830573/1/ids-vendor-tactical-flex-first-to-offer-iphone-app.html

Puget Sound Business Journal -
http://seattle.bizjournals.com/seattle/prnewswire/press_releases/national/Washington/2010/08/09/SF47279

CNBC - http://classic.cnbc.com/id/38622603

If you have questions or comments regarding Aanval, Tactical FLEX or anything related to the two — drop us an email kbitz@aanval.com or a call toll free - 800-921-2584.

WOW, Every Two Days, The Information We Create

Eric Schmidt: Every 2 Days We Create As Much Information As We Did Up To 2003 


August 5, 2010                  Source Link: Techcrunch

Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt — about five exabytes of data. He cautioned that just because companies like his can do all sorts of things with this information, the more pressing question now is if they should. 


Schmidt noted that while technology is neutral, he doesn’t believe people are ready for what’s coming. “I spend most of my time assuming the world is not ready for the technology revolution that will be happening to them soon,” Schmidt said.


Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book Future Shock popularized the term "Information Overload" which originated 
many years earlier.  


This is mind boggling for most of us to consider.  The trick is finding the information we need and want and filtering 
out everything else.

Aanval Version 5.6 is Released

The developers at Tactical FLEX have been working extremely hard (as usual).  They completed and released version 5.6 of Aanval and we are extremely pleased to announce it is immediately available for download and automated updates. This version of Aanval includes several features and functions recently requested by Aanval customers. After evaluating these suggestions the Tactical FLEX developers quickly got to work coding them into version 5.6. 

A few of the changes available in Aanval version 5.6:

: New Signature Source Manager
: New Policy Management System
: New Signature Management System
: New signature import and storage mechanism
: New signature download mechanism
: Added iPhone access enable and disable option
: Added signature source support for http/https and local directories
: Added policy management feature to support mixing signatures from multiple sources
: Fixed bug in which snort configuration file could overwrite with null data
: Fixed snort update and restart not initiating on configuration and policy changes
: Fixed dozens of minor bugs
: Various user interface enhancements
: Much, much more

A few users may notice some suggested features are not yet available or did not make it into this release. We appreciate your patience and encourage you to stay tuned as we release several maintenance updates over the coming few days.

Find a bug? Let us know... send an email to support.group@aanval.com

Need support? You can purchase Aanval licenses, training and support securely online @ www.aanval.com. 



Enjoy and stay tuned.

Is open source Snort dead? The Debate has just begun!

Ellen Messmer's article in Network World yesterday provides an update on Snort 3.0 and a rival product, the OISF's first open source release Suricata 1.0.  Many see it as superior to Snort since it inspects network packets using a multi-threading technology to inspect more than one packet at a time.  The following are quotes from Ellen's article.


"The Open Information Security Foundation (OISF) is a nonprofit group funded by the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) to come up with next-generation open source IDS/IPS.  The OISF was founded about a year and a half ago with $1 million in funding from a DHS cybersecurity research program, according to Matt Jonkman, president of OISF. He says OISF was founded to form an open source alternative and replacement to Snort, which he says is now considered dead since the research on what is supposed to be the next-generation version of Snort, Snort 3.0, has stalled.  "Snort is not conducive to IPv6 nor to multi-threading," Jonkman says......"


Snort's in a very HOT debate. http://bit.ly/ceIggx