Blue Coat Acquisition Approved By Shareholders

The Blue Coat Systems acquisition by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo was approved today, February 13, 2012 during the shareholder meeting in Sunnyvale, CA. The result of this is that Blue Coat has now been taken private, and will no longer be a publicly traded company. What effect this has on the product and roadmap remains to be seen, but the company claims this will help them focus on the product without having to worry about shareholders.

Fake Video Codecs Still Going Strong

2 years ago, Blue Coat reported in their yearly security report that the top two sources of malware infection came from the fake video codec and fake a/v rouses. In the fake video codec, a link is posted to a video or the link is emailed out, and when a user clicks on the video (usually sent or posted by a known friend whose account has been hacked), they get an error saying they don't have the correct codec to play back the video and are redirected to a download of the "right" codec, which turns out to be malware. The fake a/v scam is similar, with the user getting an error that they have a virus, and are prompted to download anti-malware software that is in fact malware. Neither of these sources of malware are new and weren't new in 2009 when Blue Coat reported that they were consistently the top two sources of infection.

The trend continues this year, and Zscaler is reporting that fake video codec based malware is still going strong.

It just goes to show you users aren't as sophisticated as you think, and they do need to be protected with a secure web gateway or web proxy that has up to date anti-malware protection.

No Surprise: Android Malware is Increasing

It should be no surprise to anyone in the security industry that Android-based malware is up 472% since July 2011 according to Juniper. If you've been following the news this year, you would already have known malware on Android has been increasing faster than on any other platform. Malware targeting smartphones is up 250% from 2009 to 2010.

It's a good reminder why you need security on your network, and for mobile devices. While your secure web gateway provides security when you're on the corporate network, mobile devices like those running Android typically roam to other networks as the end-user takes the device home and on trips.

That's when cloud based security becomes important. Cloud and mobility make sense together, since the mobile client will be tied to a cloud security solution regardless of the network the end-user is using. As we see more mobility, you'll undoubtedly see more secure web vendors touting cloud as the solution.

7 Charged With Using Malware to Rack Up $14 Million

The recent news that the Department of Justice has indicted seven people for allegedly hijacking millions of computers, manipulating traffic on popular websites, and generating more than $14 million in fraudulent advertising revenue, shows that malware does indeed enable cyber-criminals to make plenty of money, which is a good indicator that there will continue to be waves of cyber-criminals and malware in the foreseeable future.

From the PC World article on the recent news:

The defendants -- six Estonians and one Russian -- allegedly hijacked more than 4 million computers using malware that rerouted Internet traffic to websites where they would get a cut of the ad revenue. Infected computers with users looking for popular websites such as Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes were rerouted to webpages that featured the defendants’ ads.

This case is supposedly the "first of its kind," according to US Attorney Preet Bharara, because the suspects set up their own "rogue servers" in order to perform the rerouting. Using their rogue servers, the defendants were allegedly able to substitute legitimate Internet ads with their own ads, thereby generating millions in advertising revenue.

According to BusinessWeek, the indictment cited a case in which an American Express ad on the Wall Street Journal's home page was replaced -- instantly, once users clicked on it -- with an ad for "Fashion Girl LA."

About 500,000 of the infected computers were located in the United States, Bharara said in a news conference in New York. The alleged scheme, which ran from 2007 to 2011, was first discovered at NASA, where 130 computers were infected.

It's an interesting case, because it uses malware to redirect the end-users browsers and basically force them to click on ads that would help the hackers make money. It could just as easily have redirected users to more malware sites.

This particular news item highlights the need to have visibility into where end-users are going on a corporate network, and to figure out what computers have been hacked and are sitting on your corporate network.

Websense on Facebook can be bypassed

Blackhat Academy is already reporting that the new Websense web filtering that will be available on Facebook can be bypassed. Earlier this month, Websense and Facebook announced that users clicking on links inside of Facebook would have those links scanned by Websense, and those URLs examined for malware, and a pop-up would appear if those links seemed to be of a malicious intent.

Blackhat Academy showed this week that they could circumvent this technology by recognizing the request for the URL was coming from Facebook, and display a different webpage to Facebook, then the actual page being delivered. Here's an example of how this works from PC World:

Blackhat Academy members, provided a live demonstration, which involved posting the URL to a JPEG file on a wall.

Facebook crawled the URL and added a thumbnail image to the wall post, however, clicking on its corresponding link actually redirected users to YouTube. This happened because the destination page was able to identify Facebook's original request and served a JPEG file.

"While most major sites that allow link submission are vulnerable to this method, sites including Websense, Google+ and Facebook make the requests easily identifiable," the Blackhat Academy hackers said.

"These sites send an initial request to the link in order to store a mirror thumbnail of the image, or a snapshot of the website being linked to. In doing so, many use a custom user agent, or have IP addresses that resolve to a consistent domain name," they explained.

Looks like Facebook is going to have to do a little work to hide the fact that these request for categorization are coming from Facebook, if they want the true value of URL filtering.

QR Codes Lead to Malware

There's new report about QR codes leading to malware. As the author mentions, it shouldn't be a surprise and it was certainly expected to happen. It brings new light to the need for protection of smartphone and tablet devices, those most likely to scan a QR code, to be protected the same way laptops and workstations are behind something like a secure web gateway or web proxy.

While other reports have indicated there's little need for protection of iPhone devices, this new malware would indicate otherwise. Android is already known as the most at risk smartphone platform for malware.

So, if you haven't started looking at solutions for mobility around securing web browsing, maybe now is the time to start.

Panda Cloud Antivirus Outperforms McAfee, Microsoft and Trend Micro on Malware Protection in its First AV-Test.org Product Review

In Panda Cloud Antivirus' first participation in av-test.org's evaluation of antivirus vendors, Panda outperformed McAfee, Microsoft and Trend Micro among others.

The AV-Test.org evaluation, conducted between July and August 2011, compared Version 1.5.1 of Panda Cloud Antivirus to 24 other home user security products. The full report is available at http://www.av-test.org/no_cache/en/tests/test-reports/test-reports/?tx_avtestreports_pi1 [report_no]=113111.

It's an interesting positive note for a cloud based AV, and lends creedence to other cloud based architectures as well. So maybe the next step is cloud, or a mix of on premise and cloud, otherwise known as hybrid.