By Mark Akass, CTO, Global Banking and Financial Markets, BT

If we look at the last 10 years, we can clearly see huge changes in the way we protect technology. The security ‘toolbox’ has grown in capability and is available to a bigger slice of the market place.  This coupled with an explosion of technology providers, and an increasing need for firms to manage and keep an eye on the costs which come about when bringing said tools into action to fight each and every security threat. Only recently we witnessed Australia’s central bank admitting that it had played victim to repeated attacks from computer hackers.  Was the fact that no data was lost or lasting damage done down to the effective use of the advanced tools available on the market today?

Undoubtedly we have seen certain highlights in the development of the security tool kit.  Take a look at pattern matching of signature based threats¹; to anomaly detection² based on behavioural analysis; to increasing levels of sophistication in being able to identify potential threats in the context in which they are being transacted; to testing suspected transactions for executable code in real-time. The attacks may have become more advanced but then so have the tools developed to fight the war against them. [Read more...]